FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE - Trouble Booting on SPARC64 - kmem_suballoc error

[Marius Strobl]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 05:31:35PM -0500, Garrett R. Groesbeck wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I hope you are well. I've been working on a Sun Blade 2000 with FreeBSD 9.0
> (sparc64) installed.
> 
> There's trouble with /boot/loader.conf when you try to boot the install disc
> (and even after the install when I try to boot up):
> 
> panic: kmem_suballoc: bad status return of 3
> 
> So when it gives me the chance to enter a boot command, I enter the
> following:
> 
> OK set hw.physmem=1048576000
> 

That apparently is a bug in the MI part of the VM triggered by the
highly fragment physical memory of b1k and b2k with 2 GB of RAM.
You can work around it by setting the vm.kmem_size_scale tunable to
2 without sacrificing physical memory. The latter meanwhile is also
the default set by the MD part, awaiting further clues from alc at .

Marius