# $NetBSD: LAST_MINUTE,v 1.2.4.2 2005/12/18 14:00:30 tron Exp $ This file contains important information on the NetBSD 3.0 release that did not make it into the main documentation. [i386] Machines configured with more than 2 GB of physical memory may experience hangs due to running out of kernel virtual space, which is needed for kernel datastructures such as file system metadata buffers. Various kernel subsystems (including the file system metadata cache) automatically adjust their memory usage based on the amount of physical memory in the system, but this method over-allocates the available kernel virtual space (1 GB) when the amount of physical memory greatly exceeds the amount of kernel virtual space. The only reliable workaround currently known for this problem is to increase the amount of virtual space available to the kernel by adding these lines to the kernel config file: options KERNBASE_LOCORE="0x80000000" makeoptions TEXTADDR="0x80100000" This will increase the kernel virtual space to 2 GB, but this has the drawback that the application virtual space is decreased from 3 GB to 2 GB (since the 32-bit address space supported by the hardware must be shared between the kernel and application on this architecture). If any application that is to run on the system needs more than 2 GB of application virtual space, then this work-around cannot be used. A possible alternative work-around is to reduce the amount of physical memory used for file system buffers by using sysctl to change the value of the tunable "vm.bufmem_hiwater" to a lower value, perhaps 200000000 (200 MB). [all platforms] The NetBSD implementation of the POSIX thread library (libpthread) has an option (enabled by setting the environment variable "PTHREAD_CONCURRENCY" to a number greater than 1) which tells the library to run threads of a single process on more than one CPU simultaneously. This feature has various known problems and will often result in the pthread library aborting due to internal assertion failures, and sometimes it will even result in the entire systems crashing. Use of this feature is not recommended for anyone other than those working to fix the problems with it.