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List:       freebsd-hackers
Subject:    Re: Good news -- pipe stuff
From:       "John S. Dyson" <toor () dyson ! iquest ! net>
Date:       1996-01-31 18:36:23
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> 
> 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

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