>  infact, NetBSD/sparc originally was _unable_ to swap.  i used
   
   I don't think it was as bad as that..    swap on NFS wasn't working
   very well for a long time, but even that was partly fixed (i.e.
   usable on lightly loaded machines) well with the life-span of the old VM.


yes it was :-)  for the first few weeks you could not enable a
swap partition.  it was fixed fairly quickly as i recall but as
that was like 5 years ago the details fade ;)

it may have even been fixed before the first official snapshot,
but i don't think it was.