the mapped address to leap to completes. This generally manifests
itself as a random exception with RedBoot just after 'go'.
Fix it by adding a data-dependency on the 'ldr' result.
once it has been instantiated correctly, rename it to desired name. This
prevents the problem of partially created files being accessed before they
are complete. If said file is a shared library, that can cause ramdon core
dumps.
pointed out by Klaus Klein (original idea was that it should hold at least
the pathname ...); instead, let the ELF and a.out backends allocate memory
for the link command, and get rid of the fixed size buffer altogether
so the last change has us comparing pages to bytes instead of pages
to buffers! The consequence was to try to free radically less memory
than UVM wanted us to -- though always at least one buffer, which is
probably why the results weren't dire.
This does suggest that buf_canrelease() could be a *lot* more
conservative about how much to release than "2 * page deficit". In
fact, serious trouble seems to ensue if it's not -- when anything
else on the system demands enough pages, we slam down to the low
water mark nd stay there. I've adjusted it to use min(page defecit,
buffer memory / 16), which still isn't quite right but seems better.
Another change: consider the case of an infinite loop that does
"tar xzf pkgsrc.tar.gz ; rm -rf pkgsrc". Each time the rm runs,
all the dead metadata will go on the AGE list -- and, until we hit
the high-water mark, stay there, at which point it may be slowly
recycled. Two adjustments seem to solve this: 1) whack buf_lotsfree()
to return 0 if there's anything on the AGE list; 2) whack buf_canrelease()
to count the memory used by the AGE list and always return at least
that much.
This basically turns the AGE list into a "delayed free" list, since we
can't entirely eliminate it as we can't free pool items from interrupt
context (e.g. from biodone()).
To consider: with the bookkeeping corrected, should buf_drain() move
back to the _end_ of the pagedaemon, and should the calculation then
try to give back at least the current defecit?
