NetBSD/sun2: Frequently Asked Questions

General

Other sources of information


General

NFS client with a 3Com 3c400 (ec) card

The 3Com 3c400 (ec) Multibus Ethernet card can only buffer two received Ethernet packets, regardless of their length, before it starts dropping packets. Unless overridden, an NFS client read requests 8 kilobytes at a time. This means six or more packets will be sent by the server, usually quickly enough to fill the card and cause the third and subsequent packets to get dropped.

NFS has an all-or-nothing mentality about it, so the client will throw away any packets it did get and just send the request again, making for a vicious cycle. The solution is to tell NFS to only request 1 kilobyte at a time, which is done by adding an option to the client's mount command:

# mount -t nfs -o -r=1024 server:directory mountpoint

SunOS Compatibility

NetBSD/sun2 may one day feature extensive binary compatibility with SunOS 3 and SunOS 4 programs, but this work has not been done yet.

History of NetBSD/sun2

The sun2 port of NetBSD was started by Matt Fredette in January 2001. He began working with NetBSD/sun3 from the 1.5 release and after a few months had it booting multiuser. In April 2001 he began merging the port into the NetBSD tree.


Other sources of information

Off-site resources

Further information at NetBSD.org


Back to  NetBSD/sun2 ports page