vmstat's entries type

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Oliver Fromme wrote:

> > and easily triples the amount of storage for each of them...
>
> True, storage is tripled.  But how many counters are we talking about here? 
> I guess rather a few, not thousands of them, right?
>
> > It is ugly :-(
>
> Yes, I certainly agree, it's ugly.  But having wrong output from "vmstat -s" 
> and other tools is ugly, too -- and it is noticed by a lot more people.

This problem is not limited to vmstat -- the network stack uses 32-bit 
counters in a lot of places where 32-bits has become very small.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge