re: svn - cannot allocate mem

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

> > i wonder if you are running out of kernel virtual space.
>
> how can that be checked?
>
> I see no dmesg or such.

if it works, run "pmap 0", which will print the virtual space
of the kernel.  on my ss20 with the patch enabled i see:

[....]
 total   335520K

meaning i've got about 40-48MB free KVA (256 + 128 - a little
bit i forge the actual number of total.)  without my change,
i'd be able to have less files active in memory i think.  top
says this:

Memory: 250M Act, 121M Inact, 9460K Wired, 11M Exec, 341M File, 16M Free
Swap: 512M Total, 512M Free / Pools: 99M Used

and looks like i've got very poor pool usage now.  vmstat -m:

In use 65162K, total allocated 100736K; utilization 64.7%

> > i was seeing random weirdness with it about 3 years ago, and then my
> > SS20 stopped working, but i've fixed it since, so i'll try have a
> > patch for you to test soon...
>
> You mention SS20. As said, my older SS10 with netbsd 8.x never exhibited 
> the issue.

older netbsd did not trigger the problems was seeing about 3 years
ago when i first workedon the e8-kernel work.  that was related to
running out of KVA to map things like files and fds i think, i did
not write any notes unfrotunately.  ie, i was trying to solve what
was a new problem to me.

> Recently I was able to kick online my trusty old SparcStation 4 again, 
> there I did not notice the issue, but use it also less.
>
> I got it running now and were doing the same things in parallel, 
> compiling the same sources.... takes a lot more, but it means it will do 
> similar operations. (ssh, running git & svn which appears always 
> critical, compiling with gcc many source files)
> Up to now, it completed the same stuff and did not get the issue.. I did 
> run more hours compiling, all fine. I just shut it down for the weekend now.
>
> Now I don't know if is so exactly reproducible, but it may be a hint. It 
> seems to affect the SS20 and a major difference is the dual CPU presence.

are you running GCC at the same time as svn and/or git?  i do not
recommend doing that.  modern GCC can use more ram than any 32 bit
sparc that runs netbsd can have, so depending on what you're compiling
there's literally nothing left for anything else, and that would be
quite indicative of svn saying it can't run.  one thing i do is have
several windows monitoring the host:

   - vmstat 1
   - iostat -x <maybe disk list> 1
   - top -t -s1 -1

i've also run the top in a shell loop with the "-b" option so that
it acts like a non-curses program and emits just one list of procs
and exits (ie, no screen refresh, etc., better log in some apps.)


.mrg.