The scoop on 3.51c (was Re: 3.51c about to be released?)

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <1215 at oswego.Oswego.EDU> dab at oswego.oswego.edu.Oswego.EDU 
(Dave Bozak) writes:
|>In the May '89 issue of _UNIX World_ Jim Pickering writes (in the
|>Reader's Comments section) that he understands that 3.51c is about
|>to be released.
|>
|>Is this true?  How will we know?
|>
|>Whatever happened to 3.51b?  I've got 3.51a, and never knew of a 3.51b
|>(and I don't want that to happen with 3.51c!).
|>

I did see Jim's comments in _UNIX World_ magazine this month, and I wanted
to thank him for recognizing us dedicated hardware hackers too.  As far as
the "3.51c" fixdisk, 3.51c is unfortunately long gone as far as the kernel
hackers at AT&T are concerned.  Currently I'm running 3.51dA (yes, that's
hex for 10th copy of 3.51d...)  Yes, there were many a kernel my way, some
worse, some good, some indifferent.  Right now there is a serious bug with
the "clists" just disappearing.  This has held up the forthcoming fixdisk
for quite some time.  Myself, and a few other UNIX pc'ers out there are 
sorta "beta" testing these kernels on our machines.  The clist buffer problem 
is also known as the "slow down and die symptoms" ... What happens if 
NCLIST (tunable parameter) clists are all allocated (and never get released)
the next time the machine goes to request a clist buffer [which happens
quite often for character devices :-)] it will just wait indefinitely until
one becomes available ... then the [Working] icon will just sit and stare
you in the face.

Right now my average uptime is less than two days ...

I should have 150 clists maximum ... right now I have:

		Fri Apr 28 22:28:47 1989 cblocks = 105

And that's with less than 1 day of uptime... where did 45 cblocks go.  That
is what has the AT&T "guru" perplexed ... We all want to see this 

You can check your clists by doing:

# adb /unix /dev/kmem
cfreelist+6/d

The number at that location is your total cblocks currently available...
I'd be curious to know if this is happening to everyone out there (even
those on the 3.5 release of the kernel).

# ktune -d
nbuf 100
ninode 400
nfile 300
nproc 100
ntext 75
nclist 150   <-- that's your maximum
npbuf 16
ncall 32
nttyhog 1024

						That's it for now ...
						-Lenny
-- 
Lenny Tropiano             ICUS Software Systems         [w] +1 (516) 582-5525
lenny at icus.islp.ny.us      Telex; 154232428 ICUS         [h] +1 (516) 968-8576
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