On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 12:11:08PM -0700, Shawn W. wrote:
> load average when idle is consistently in the 0.08-0.10 range.  
> Looking at top, [ioflush] is consistently at the top of CPU-usage. 

This is not sparc64 specific. The syncer wakes up periodically and
looks for work - apparently it gets sampled often enough as "runnable"
so it adds to the load average. I'm not sure if we should worry about it,
or even work around it for cosmetic reasons.
 
> Also, since while 3.1 is the latest release, it seems to be based on  
> a many-years-old version of the development tree, I'm thinking about  
> updating to a 4.0 beta (If I can find a recent one compiled for  
> sparc64) or a -current snapshot (They're not the same thing, right?  

Yes, they are not the same thing.

You can find snapshots on 

   ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-4/*/iso

or

   ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/*/iso

You can find information about the versioning here:

   http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/release-map.html

One concrete difference between the 4.0 branch and -current right now is the
new threading in -current. 4.0 will still have the SA based one (though many
bugs have been fixed).


Hope this helps,

Martin