*BSD News Article 8711


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From: tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu (Mark Tinguely)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Occasional system hangs
Message-ID: <ByysLH.Axr@ns1.nodak.edu>
Date: 8 Dec 92 23:44:04 GMT
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References: <1992Dec2.134644.12405@cli.di.unipi.it> <1992Dec2.140837.12619@cli.di.unipi.it> <jason.723781864@sorokin>
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In article <jason.723781864@sorokin> jason@sorokin.anu.edu.au (Jason Andrade) writes:
>luigi@iet.unipi.it writes:
>>I'm running 386bsd, with most of patches installed, on a 486-33, *meg
>>RAM, IDE drive, WD8013 clone. The system works more or less fine, except
>>that I'm experiencing hangs every now and then
>
>Interesting. I'm having exactly the same problems. Runing nroff 3 or 4 times or compiling a lot seems to hang the system too. (18 reboots so far and about 20% of the srcdist compiled...). I've speculated that its because the machine isnt 
>swapping, but i dont really know how id find out if this is the case..

this is the infamous VM problem. When swap is filled (or gets totally
fragmented), the system can freeze. The nature of the VM makes this problem
very difficult to totally solve. There are attempts to correct this problem
for good. You can avoid the symptoms by adding more swap space. You must
backup/make new partitions/restore (unless DOS resides after 386bsd AND
swap space is at the end of your 386bsd partition layout).

--mark.
added 386bsd at