In muc.lists.netbsd.port.sparc64 Martin Husemann wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 04:11:14PM +0100, segv@netctl.net wrote:
>> Greetings, just out of interest did anyone manage to unravel the mystery of
>> why/how threading applications tend to completely freeze a running system?

>I could not find any open PRs describing symptoms similar than your 
>description, nor have I seen this myself.

Well, I've seen this quite a lot early this year - with my U5 crashing
almost daily, as soon as clamav-milter happened to be swapped out (usually
during amanda backups).

This was with NetBSD-2.0.1, on Sparc64, and the crashes stopped happening
as soon as I re-built perl5.8 and clamav-milter using pth from pkgsrc.

I don't think I opened a PR at that time, because I wasn't sure it's an
operating system problem - felt more like "hardware dying" at that time,
but in the end it wasn't the hardware.  There was a long thread on 
port-sparc64, though.

I have not been following development on this, so I can't say whether
this has been fixed in 3.0 or -current, but "not using system threads" 
has made things quite stable for me (also running web browsers on a 
memory-limited machine) - I didn't really feel like trying either.

gert
-- 
gert@greenie.muc.de   fax: +49-89-35655025   http://alpha.greenie.net/mgetty/

He who fears the unknown may one day flee from his own backside.
               --Sinbad