*BSD News Article 24132


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
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From: mike%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Mike Hibler)
Subject: Re: BSD44 on a SPARC questions
Date: 17 Nov 93 14:22:40 MST
Message-ID: <1993Nov17.142240.29038@hellgate.utah.edu>
Organization: University of Utah Computer Science
References: <35396@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <CGCCLz.pL2@austin.ibm.com> <35439@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Lines: 19

In article <35439@dog.ee.lbl.gov> torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:
>In article <CGCCLz.pL2@austin.ibm.com> roger@wizards.austin.ibm.com
>(Roger Florkowski) writes:
>>[hang with 8 MB]
>
>The Mach 2.5 VM, as adapted into BSD, is prone to hangs.  There may
>also be an as-yet-undiscovered race somewhere in the sparc code.
>
It is actually the Mach 2.0 VM, but yes, as implemented in BSD there are
no limit checks when allocating VM (other than the per-process rlimits).
So once you have allocated more than your swap + physmem it will eventually
lock up when it can't page out anything (due to lack of swap) and hence
can't page in anything new.  This reflects the "its just a prototype,
I'll take care of that later" heritage of the VM code (where "later"
never came).

As for the swap_pager printf, just set swpagerdebug to 0.  It was originally
set to detect anomalous conditions that I wasn't expecting to see on my
machine and that might indicate races or resource leaks.