Hi all,
I'm an OpenBSD hobbyist who has an experimental installation of OpenBSD 4.5
on an interesting VAXstation 4000/60 with 104 MB of RAM (mostly because I
can, not because I need to). I've run into some interesting behaviour with
rsync.
rsync runs normally for awhile but crashes with:
[sender] make_file(usr/obj/games/fortune/datfiles/limerick.dat,*,2)
[sender] make_file(usr/obj/games/fortune/fortune/.depend,*,2)
ERROR: out of memory in flist_expand [sender]
rsync error: error allocating core memory buffers (code 22) at util.c(117)
[sender=3.0.5]
_exit_cleanup(code=22, file=util.c, line=117): about to call exit(22)
A post to [email protected] by me a week or so ago explained that I could not
increase this to 64 megabytes (or indeed anything over 32MiB), and that I
suspected this was the problem. A reply suggested that it likely was and
that I could possibly recompile my kernel by changing MAXDSIZ in
/usr/src/sys/arch/vax/include/vmparam.h. I was warned that this might break
things (which I surmised).
I tried it. With a 64 MB size I get a kernel panic... but much later in the
process. The original failures were not always at the identical point but
very close to a single point, and early in the process. I got much more
data backed up with this experiment. rsync itself did not crash (at least,
the only failure I got was the kernel panic).
I tried again with 48 MB. This time, rsync still failed, but again, much
later in the process than with 32 MB data space. I also got a kernel panic
but I think that was later (I wasn't watching the console at the time).
Now, I know the VAX is old... but I wonder if this problem with rsync might
be evidence of an issue with it. I have other very modest machines running
with far more limited resources, and they can handle rsync fine with similar
sizes of data to back up. I'm not familiar with what other OpenBSD
platforms might be limited to 32 MB data spaces.
My syntax:
rsync -a -e ssh --progress --delete --exclude /some/excluded/NFS/paths
local.server.prv:/path/to/backup/
Nothing extraordinary.
The other question begged is whether the VAX kernel can be successfully
deployed with >32 MB data space, but I don't have the coding expertise to
answer that question. I can certainly offer to help with any needed
experiments.
I know my hardware to be reliable; it's built the entire kernel and user
space without issue.
Is this worthy of a bug report? Could it be affecting other platforms,
potentially?
Jim
