[616] in NetBSD-Development
System instabilities and ps
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Sun Mar 5 16:38:49 1995
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 16:37:16 -0500
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
I've discovered why my system was unstable under -current: I was
starting up a zwgc process every ten minutes, which was filling up
swap space. (/usr/local/bin/zlog was using ps to determine if a zwgc
process was running, and ps didn't work.) Worst of all, every class
sipb zephyrgram was causing all of those zwgcs to get swapped in and
run. It's still a bit disappointing that glacier would respond by
simply hanging after it runs out of swap space, but not too alarming.
libkvm and ps can't be compiled for -current without replacing
/usr/include/sys and /usr/include/machine. In order to ensure that
people can compile any program for their machine and have it work, we
would have to replace /usr/include/sys and /usr/include/machine; on
the other hand, only libkvm, ps, w, and maybe gdb are affected, so
it's not clear whether it's worth the effort. Currently I'm leaning
towards replacing them, just for correctness value.
A couple of notes while I'm here:
* Since the Athena-ized login supports S/Key, the install
script now installs it without asking the user (it leaves
the old one in /usr/bin/login.old). It also creates
/etc/noremote without asking the user. Both actions are
noted like any other file replacement or creation.
* jhawk obviously didn't test the /etc/athena/rc.athena file
he asked me to put in the distribution, since it doesn't
work; ldconfig doesn't like files with dots in their names
before the ".o". I modified the script (in the source tree
and in the distribution, but not on granola, so granola is
still broken) to substitute '_' for '.' in the OS revision.
* I'm going to update the distribution on rtfm probably today
or tomorrow with the /usr/bin/login and rc.athena changes,
as well as the /etc/services changes which I don't think
have made it onto rtfm yet. There have been enough changes
that I want to test an installation on quiche before I
update rtfm.
