Subject: Paging, tar, and ELF
To: None <>
From: Paulo Alexandre Pinto Pires <>
List: current-users
Date: 02/17/1999 13:11:15
Hello to all.

I supped last night's (19990216) source, built a new kernel from it
and had it installed.  While building the system under the new kernel
in my i386, it stopped and got int DDB, apparently trying to page
out a process unsuccessfully.  At that moment, I was also in X,
running KDE, xterm and WordPerfect for Linux, so I suppose that I
had a lot of real memory within my 64Mb grabbed by these.

Since I remember recent discussion on paging problems and have been
running -current for quite a while in different i386, sparc and
Sun3 boxes without ever having seen such paging errors, I'd like
to know if I just had been lucky for a long time or if this paging
issue is a recently triggered (and hopefully quickly disappearing)
bug somewhere.

Another question is about tar+gzip.  From time to time, tar xzvf
causes SIGPIPE error messages from gzip, but extraction happens
OK.  Gunzipping the file and untarring it as separate operations
desn't produce a single warning message.  Perhaps tar is finishing
faster than gzip, but why wouldn't the latter exit at EOF before
tar got to end-of-archive (unless that there is trailing garbage,
which doesn't seem to be the case)?

And last, Is any architecture already scheduled to swicth to ELF
beside i386?