From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 31 15:39:42 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id PAA24777 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 15:39:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from dyson.iquest.net (dyson.iquest.net [198.70.144.127]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id PAA24758 for ; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 15:39:34 -0800 (PST) Received: (from root@localhost) by dyson.iquest.net (8.6.11/8.6.9) id SAA03189; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 18:36:23 GMT From: "John S. Dyson" Message-Id: <199601311836.SAA03189@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Re: Good news -- pipe stuff To: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 18:36:23 +0000 () Cc: peter@jhome.DIALix.COM, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: from "Jake Hamby" at Jan 31, 96 10:31:56 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Another thing to look into, although I don't have a benchmark on this, but > FreeBSD has a nasty tendency to "bind" during heavy VM/disk activity. I > don't know if this is because the IDE driver is CPU intensive, or if this > affects people (to a lesser extent) with SCSI drives. It's just that when > the system starts paging out to disk, activity in other windows freezes up > too. I have 24MB of RAM on my box at home, and notice this quite often, > which is even more surprising since I don't push my system more than, say, > running a copy of Netscape, emacs, pine, and maybe a compile. > That problem has been fixed in -current, I believe. It was really starting to bug me :-). > Speaking of VM, I set up a system with only 8MB of RAM running FreeBSD, > and even though we made a 24MB swap partition, occasionally it fills up. > Both boxes are running 2.1.0-RELEASE. If it is not too difficult, I > would be REALLY grateful if we could add functionality to add swapfiles > and swap partitions to a running system. You can add swap files, there are people who know how, but you need to use the vn device right now. > Even better would be the > ability to remove the swapfile without rebooting. Linux (and most > SVR4's) have had this functionality for a LONG time. As it is, our BSD > limitation of only swapping to the b slice of any particular partition is > EXTREMELY frustrating in such situations where extra swap is temporarily > needed. Absolutely, you are right, and I am going to add that to my hotlist. Next time I start working on the swap pager and friends (which it really does need to be now, with the VOP_GETPAGES/VOP_PUTPAGES functionality in the system.) John Dyson