pstat -s

[Alan's Home for Wayward Notes File.]

In article <77136 at bu.edu.bu.edu>, jdh at bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
> The man page for pstat refers to the "-s" option as follows:
> 
> [ Customer quotes the -s option from the pstat(8) manual page
>   wherein something called "argdev" is mentioned". ]
> 
> So what exactly are "pages allocated to argdev"?  Here's what it looks
> like on one of our machines (DECstation-3100, Ultrix 4.0)

	Once upon a time the virtual memory used to do command line
	argument processesing was backed by disk blocks from a special
	swap device; argdev.  If you wanted to you could point some-
	where other than the usual page/swap device in the configuration
	file.  A few versions ago this feature was removed or made
	unnecessary.  Appearantly the manual page was never updated.
> 
> /etc/pstat -s
> 141751k swap configured
> 115867k reserved virtual address space
>         34164k used (9760k text, 0k smem)
>         31364k free, 2056k wasted, 76223k missing
> avail: 975*32k 164*1k
> 
> So, "76223k missing" sounds like a lot of space.

	Typical reason for having lots of page/swap space missing
	is that you've specified an extra device for page/swap in
	the configuration file, but haven't added a line to /etc/
	fstab to turn on paging/swapping on it when swapon(8) runs.

	In the configuration you might say:

		config vmunix root on rz0a swap on rz0b and rz1b and rz2b

	In /etc/fstab you'll have line like:

		/dev/rz1b::sw:0:0:ufs::

	for the first secondary page/swap space, not one for the 2nd.
	You don't need one for the primary page/swap.  Add a line for
	the missing space:

		/dev/rz2b::sw:0:0:ufs::

	And run swapon.  You'll probably get a "device mounted" message
	for the one already in use.
	
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jason Heirtzler           (617) 353-2780       jdh at bu-pub.bu.edu
> Information Technology    Boston University    ..!bu.edu!bu-pub!jdh  


-- 
Alan Rollow				alan at nabeth.cxn.dec.com