I said recently that I had some problems with kernel panics when
running NetBSD with the Kinetic card in my RiscPC. I should have
looked at the problem more thoroughly as it turned out to be a
bug in my program that was causing the panics. OTOH as I was
running the programs as an ordinary user without root priviledges
then I do not think that I should have been able to break
anything. Correct?
Anyway, I have carried out some tests with the Kinetic card and it
worked flawlessly. I wrote a program that allocated a 10,000,000
element integer array and manipulated it in various ways. I
assumed that on a machine running nothing but this program the
entire array would be paged in and that at least some of it would
be held in the faster memory on the Kinetic card. The program
worked with no problems. I then ran two copies of the program at
the same time and again everything worked. The machine was not
paging so most of the new memory must have been in use by this
stage. I reduced the size of the array slightly and ran three
copies of the program simultaneously to make the system page. The
programs ran for over three hours with the RiscPC paging more or
less constantly. The test produced no errors. I have run only one
test program that exercises memory, but it suggests to me that
NetBSD works well on the Kinetic card. You can all rush out and
buy one now. :-)
As an aside, it was interesting watching the program running using
'top' and comparing it to the same program on a PC which was
running NetBSD/i386. On the RiscPC all three instances of the
program received approximately the same amount of service. The CPU
time figures for the programs increased at roughly the same rate.
On the PC one instance of the program hogged the processor. It
averaged 96% of the CPU whilst the other two received about 1%
each. Can anybody suggest why two versions of the same OS behave
so differently? The PC was running NetBSD 1.4.2 and the RiscPC has
NetBSD 1.4.1 on it. 
Dave Daniels
 
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