KVA Issue?

[Matthew Seaman]

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 03:09:49PM -0400, lost inferno wrote:
> I was wondering... and thought i'd comment on something i've read... is 
> there something going on
> in the kva area that's bad? (AKA exaustion through malloc routine)  I found 
> something that made me curious, and thought I'd see what you thought.  I'm 
> really debating now about what i should move my production machines to.  
> They claim to have a patch...
> 
> http://gobsd.com/node/view/39
> 
> Interested to see what everyone thinks.

I don't know enough to judge if that patch is correct or not, but the
description "very unstable" is a bit exaggerated.  This is not a
condition that will see your machine blowing up and falling over every
ten minutes, or even every 10 days.  In fact you'll only run into it
if you are running your machine particularly hard and doing memory
intensive things.  If it was as bad as that article makes out there
would be an unending series of complaining e-mails to this list, the
freebsd-stable list, the freebsd-hackers list and probably any five
other freebsd mailing lists you care to mention.  That just hasn't
happened.

Remember that the whole DragonFly BSD fork was the result not just of
arguments about the technical direction of the FreeBSD project, but
due in part to personality conflicts and politicking between various
cliques of FreeBSD developers.  It's quite possible that the patches'
author still has issues with some members of the FreeBSD project.

By all means try out the patch provided.  If you prefer, try out
DragonFly BSD -- but I wouldn't go betting the whole business on it
just yet.  DFBSD has yet to make it's 1.0 release.  Keep your
production systems on one of the FreeBSD 4.x-RELEASE branches for the
time being, and wait and see what happens with FreeBSD 5-STABLE and
DragonFly BSD 1.0 release.

	Cheers,

	Matthew	

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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