Kevin P. Neal:

> Because it seems the attitude on the mailing lists is of people looking
> for the magic bullet. The "perfect" solution. Until that is found,
> nothing will happen.

Maybe.  Well, I do think this is good - I don't want NetBSD to became a
quick and dirty hack.  But on the other hand, I think the VM system is
a very important part of NetBSD (for me at least, I can't afford having
64 MB of RAM on every system) which should be fixed, if possible at all.
I see my swap space filling up slowly (with 16 MB of physical RAM) and I
feel stupid having to kill and restart processes or reboot the system
because of the 'memory leak'.  Regular rebooting because of a kernel
'feature' doesn't sound very professional to me. :)

> Didn't cgd show that platform-independent bounce-buffers can't
> be done? Or at least can't be done for i386 + Alpha platforms?
> I mean, we have plenty of i386 ways, but they don't work on
> the alpha. (I think). So why not give in, put in the bounce
> buffers on the i386, and then fix it if you come up with a
> workable solution in the future.

Is this a big problem on Alphas?  I guess there are lots of ISA SCSI
cards around for i386, but I think most Alpha users would use PCI
cards instead?  This isn't a problem to me; if/when I get a i386 box
to run NetBSD, I'll get a PCI SCSI interface for it.

> Notice that ftp.cdrom.com is a FreeBSD box, Yahoo internet search
> is a FreeBSD box, and NetBSD is doing not nearly as big a job
> at anything. FreeBSD tends to be used for larger servers because
> of those two problems. 

I'm installing new NetBSD boxes in several places here, and I'm a bit
worried about the memory leakage.  I can live without the bounce buffers. ;)

Again, I really appreciate the work that people have done for NetBSD.
I just wish the remaining problems could be fixed (yeah, I know, there
are other problems than these, I just don't know about them ;-)

  -jm