[ On Thu, April 16, 1998 at 11:14:42 (-0400), J. Maynard Gelinas wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Sun 3/60 and XKernel trouble: dies with exception
>
>       The problem continues, thought I suspect it's better now than
>       what you experienced.  I get around 24 hours of continuous
>       operation before it goes south.  Looks like a memory leak
>       in the kernel somewhere... (though, that's pretty obvious). ;-) 

That's closer to what I could live with, though I think I'd be much more
happy with 4-5 times that.  I've been logged in now for 18 days on my
workstation here at home, but I probably should logout and reboot just
to clean up all the stray windows I've left around.

Also, given that I'm a relative pig in terms of X11 memory usage (what
with many xterms, emacs windows, etc, and a virtual window manager with
at least four views) I might not even make 24 hours....

>       SunOS 4.1.1 still beats NetBSD/Sun3 hands down for stability and
>       hardware support.  Still, I'd rather run NetBSD anb know I'm
>       using an open source OS - that other folks are still updating -
>       than use 4.1.1, which I doubt anyone at Sun even _remembers_
>       ever existed.

I agree 100% on both respects.  That's why I never migrated my sun3
server to NetBSD when it was in production -- without full and complete
support for the ECC memory boards I'd have been sunk, not to mention
that before 1.3 or near there the performance sucked too.  Even with
SunOS I was in a sorry state, but at least I knew something was wrong
and didn't suffer (much) system corruption.

I'm even somewhat worried about parity-memory support on the sparc,
esp. after recent horror stories, but I do have some experimental
patches to add support for parity and ecc memory on the sparc, so
if/when I find the time....

>  Why do you expect to have a problem serving SunOS
>       Xkernel binaries from a NetBSD NFS server?  NetBSD supports RARP
>       and tftp, and you should be able to mount SunOS filesystems (you
>       needn't write over what you already have).  Am I missing
>       something obvious here?

It's not that there's any problem doing this, just that it needs to be
done.  I can't just mount the same disk, as I would need to reuse that
disk space for NetBSD -- I'd be moving my diskless server over onto the
sparc that is running NetBSD.  I've much more productive, or at least
interesting, ways to spend my time than copying everything over and
reconfiguring, etc.  It "just works" the way it is, and I'm happy as
is.  I really don't use it as much of anything but an X terminal, mind
you, which is why I was thinking of trying out the Xkernel distribution.

I run real xterms (ncd) from the sparc server too, and am happy with
them except that their colour displays are impossible for me to use
compared to this beautiful and crisp 1600x1200 monochrome bwtwo.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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