Date:  Fri, 07 Mar 2003 08:32:35 -0500
From:  madodel at ptdprolog.net
Subject:  [VOICENWS] SW: 20030306 testcase kernels available

From:  "Scott E. Garfinkle" 


I put up new kernels, primarily to give people a chance to give  feedback
on yet another attempt to save stack  space when doing program loads.
Please try the kernels with  LDRSTACKOPT=TRUE and FALSE, if you're 
interested.  Basically, the problem is that OS/2 was designed with the
hard-to-change assumption that there  would only ever be 4k of ring 0
stack for each thread. All work by  kernel, device drivers, and
filesystems gets  done on this stack. Fair enough However, the kernel
takes a fair chunk of this space to save local stuff (because  recursion
is possible). Where we see the worst behavior is trying to  demand-load an
EXE or DLL from a LAN  drive where we're using TCPBEUI (instead of
netbeui). Also, SMP is  worse than UNI in terms of stack usage.   The net
result is a ring 0 trap 0008 under some circumstances.  On the other hand,
making this go away requires  some overhead in execution time. So, people
who don't have these  problems may want to turn off the changes  with
LDRSTACKOPT=FALSE

Well, let me know. Thanks!!
	-scott

URL: ftp://testcase.boulder.ibm.com/ps/fromibm/os2/

[Moderator's note: As always these are not officially supported by IBM
unless they tell you to use them.  Please send any followup to 
comp.os.os2.bugs  on usenet.  Also note that files are only on IBM's
testcase for 2-3 days, so if you want to try these get them now.   Make
certain you back up any files replaced and don't try these on a production
system.  Read any readme file before applying any changes.  If your system
is working well, and you have no problems addressed by these updates, do
yourself a favour and don't mess with this.  You have been warned.  

From the readme.txt acompanying these kernel files, changes since the last
testcase kernels(20030213):

  20030303 14.093f
       - backed out the file closing change in 0213, as it seems to be
causing
         problems on some systems. the underlying problem will be
investigated
	 later in individual drivers.
       - change to fix from JR17862 in 0213 kernel due to possible
regression
         that would result in a semaphore not timing out properly
       PJ29066 possible fix for a rare trap in _qsSem running pstat
       JR17842 various dump formatter rc:5 problems (fixed in
df_ret/df_deb)
  20030306 14.093g
       - w_dup fix back in
       - another shot at fixing the trap 8 problems while running an ISS
or
      using tcpbeui. If you're using tcpbeui (*especially *under SMP), you
      should not use this. If you're using an ISS, we ignore this. For
others,
      you may get some speed improvement in loading apps by adding
      LDRSTACKOPT=FALSE to config.sys (the default being true).]
            

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