Re: What is the "[system]" process representing ?

2016-10-03 Thread Mike Pumford 

On 03/10/2016 19:35, Swift Griggs wrote:


Folks, I recently installed NetBSD on a Lenovo M83 Tiny machine and from
time to time, I notice the "[system]" (appears to be a kernel thread?)
getting up to 80% of the CPU while the box is doing  nothing. No
processes are active and a reboot clears the issue (except when it
doesn't. I power-cycle *then* it's cleared). The only reason I noticed in
the first place was because of the system-fan spinning up. FYI, this is
just a standard NetBSD 7 install (not -current).

What is "[system]" really doing? Is there a way to get a more granular
look at what is going on?

[system] in top at least is the netbsd kernel so its the accumulated 
usage of all of the kernel threads in the system. If you want to see it 
broken down press t in top which displays the threads of processes. 
Should be able to see which kernel thread is taking up your CPU.


From my Linux experiece there isn't a top view that corresponds to the 
netbsd default view as linux top always shows all kernel threads as 
separate processes.


Mike

What is the "[system]" process representing ?

2016-10-03 Thread Swift Griggs 

Folks, I recently installed NetBSD on a Lenovo M83 Tiny machine and from 
time to time, I notice the "[system]" (appears to be a kernel thread?) 
getting up to 80% of the CPU while the box is doing  nothing. No 
processes are active and a reboot clears the issue (except when it 
doesn't. I power-cycle *then* it's cleared). The only reason I noticed in 
the first place was because of the system-fan spinning up. FYI, this is 
just a standard NetBSD 7 install (not -current).

What is "[system]" really doing? Is there a way to get a more granular 
look at what is going on?

On another system, I have a question about a 1.8Ghz CoreDuo based 32-bit 
i386 laptop with 2GB of RAM. I noticed that '[system]' accumulates the 
most time on the host, but it's never "on the board" when I run top or 
other tools. It's overall usage is trivial. However, I notice that if I 
install debian 8.6 on this machine, I see that 'systemd' (yes, I know it's 
much different and not a kernel process and not apples to apples) is 
_always_ taking between 5-10% of the CPU and is nearly always the #1 
consumer. This is on a fresh installation! I just want to make sure I'm 
not missing some critical fact like perhaps the '[system]' process on 
NetBSD is masking it's CPU usage and is doing the same amount of work 
(doubtful, but possible). This is, after all, a pretty old machine.

So, the basic question is this. Is my x61 ThinkPad actually getting 
slapped around by systemd or is it that system just so slow it's just 
exaggerating an effect that would be hard to detect on a fast/new box? I'm 
trying to rule out some mistake or misconfiguration on my part that a 
systemd advocate (ie.. not me) would point out and say "You just didn't do 
it right."

The corollary is, does NetBSD do the same work but just mask the CPU 
usage? I really really doubt this but I wanted to ask to make sure before 
I make any kind of "linux vs netbsd" claim in this case. 

Man, if that's really the "new normal" for Linux, it's hard to believe. 
I'm tempted to install it on my 500Mhz AMD Geode system. It'd probably 
take up 50% of the CPU if the effect scales... Maybe they don't care 
because they've already eschewed both sysv-init and systemd for 
Busybox-init? Great news for embedded BSD developers, I'd think. :-P

Thanks,
  Swift

bozohttpd minor fixes to man page

2016-10-03 Thread Swift Griggs 

I like NetBSD's httpd. I noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies in the 
bozohttpd(8) manual page. Where should I report these?

* The -v option appears twice in the options summary. It's shown as both a 
  flag and a switch that takes options. They can't be both right. 

* The -V option is documented in the manual page, but does not appear in 
  the options summary block at the top of the manual page. It's also 
  unclear if "slashdir" is an option for -V or if the text refers to the 
  "slashdir" given as the document root.

* -V is also not documented in the usage when you get help directly from 
  the binary (ie.. just run /usr/libexec/httpd to see what I mean). 


-Swift