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Date:      Sun, 21 Jan 1996 22:52:29 +1000 (EST)
From:      Gary Roberts <gdr@ajax.che.curtin.edu.au>
To:        joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Leaving OS at 1.1.5.1 (was Re: BSDvs Lxxxxx Flame.. )
Message-ID:  <199601211252.WAA02010@ajax.che.curtin.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199601202022.VAA01530@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Jan 20, 96 09:21:59 pm

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J Wunsch writes:

> No, this machine is still on 1.1.5.1.  And will remain so, i think.

May I ask why, in particular?  I have my personal system still at 1.1.5.1
too and it is very stable apart from one annoying thing.  It is a notebook
with 16 meg and 515 meg IDE disk (but shared with a rather inferior but
unavoidable `other OS' unfortunately :-]. )  I run X and like to have a
number of sessions to other hosts open simultaneously so I usually have
10 or more xterms going.  Because I felt I needed to be a bit miserly with
disk space, I only allocated 24 meg for swap (40 meg total VM seemed
adequate at the time :-] ).

Up until very recently I had never bothered `net-surfing' but when I loaded
one of the 2.1.0 SNAP's on another machine at work, I decided to run the
BSDI netscape 2.0b3 on the other machine, displaying on my external 17"
monitor.  It was late one night and I got quite engrossed.  After about
2 hours, my notebook locked up hard and had to be power cycled.  This
scared me quite a bit but after rebooting and finding no apparent damage
(although fsck did complain a bit :-] ) I ran netscape again on the other
machine.  Previous to this I had never had any problem whatsoever, so I
was keen to find out why this happened.  It's a long story, and there were
several more lockups but I eventually noticed that the lock-ups were being
caused by running out of swap.  Quitting the netscape display and all of the
xterms, except one, reclaimed some of the swap space but as soon as I
restarted things it virtually all disappeared again immediately.

I figured it was probably a known problem and that there were probably
patches around somewhere to fix it.  I didn't bother worrying about it
too much as I planned to just upgrade to 2.1.0-RELEASE anyway.  Pressure
of other things has made me put off the upgrade for a bit but I was just
about to start very soon.

Your comment about not upgrading your 1.1.5.1 system made me wonder why
not?

Also does anyone have a pointer to any patches to fix whatever the problem
is with swap allocation/deallocation on 1.1.5.1?

Cheers,
-- 
Gary Roberts  (gdr@wcs.uq.edu.au) (Ph +617 3844 0400  Fax +617 3844 0444)
4th Floor, South Bank House, 234 Grey St, South Bank  QLD 4101  Australia.



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