km@emory.uucp (Ken Mandelberg) (07/15/87)
We just got a copy of Macsyma from Symbolics for a 4 Meg Sun 3. I was suprised that it ran fairly slowly (slower than a microvax) and traced it to a lot of heavy paging. Macsyma is really a big Lisp program and Symbolics uses a port of Franz Lisp to the Sun. One thing that struck me was that I did not see the vadvise VA_ANOM flag on in a ps, which BSD uses to live with Lisp's random page references. First, I thought that Symbolics had for some reason deleted the vadvise and that was the problem. So as an experiment I wrote a tiny C function to turn on vadvise and used Lisp's C interface (cfasl) to load and then run it. I found that the VA_ANOM flag still did not show in a ps. Just to be sure I ran the same tiny function standalone and VA_ANOM did show in a ps. So for some reason Sun OS ignores vadvise when Lisp runs. That does not happen on the Vax (quite the opposite). I've checked the kernel source for Sun OS, and it seems to follow BSD without change. Any ideas? -- Ken Mandelberg | gatech!emory!km USENET Emory University | km@emory CSNET,BITNET Dept of Math and CS | km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANET Atlanta, Ga 30322 | Phone: (404) 727-7963