2001-Jan-08

top: sysctl vm.uvmexp failed: Cannot allocate memory

I noticed this error last week when I ran top, but I thought something else was wrong. Today I started to research this further; I found a few postings via dejanews, but nothing useful. I decided to fix this problem by updating my source via CVS. But I didn't have CVS setup correctly.

cvs checkout: cannot open CVS/Entries for reading: No such file or directory

So I nuked all source, but it didn't work, because I had an empty "src" directory -- which was also my mount point so I didn't want to remove it. So I downloaded from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release/ the top-level.tar.gz; it had some CVS information and a Makefile. Then "cvs co -r netbsd-1-5" worked.

Then I built a new kernel (after rebuilding usr.sbin/config). *It would be nice to make a script to look at my dmesg.boot to help configure my kernel -- it may save a few minutes. (Strangely my computer wouldn't boot back up. After the BIOS detected the drives it rebooted and did the memory count/check again and again. I put in a floppy and booted from "wd0a:netbsd" and it worked. I believe this is a BIOS or hardware problem, because it occurs before it ever gets to any OS.) top worked too! I think I had a "-current" kernel before with 1.5_BETA top. Now I have a 1.5 kernel (1.5.1_ALPHA).

Later, I worked on a couple scripts for creating X menus. I also posted to messages to tech-pkg@netbsd to discuss this. The first script looked through /var/db/pkg and built a menu datafile. The second script used this datafile to generate a blackbox menu. This is at http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/netbsd/build_menu/.