[Info-vax] 8.4 and DECwindows CDE login box not coming up

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-23 06:18:52 +0000, Paul Sture said:

> Have you tried increasing GBLPAGES as well?
> 
> I'll suggest adding 50,000 to GBLPAGES.  Yes that's a figure plucked
> from the air, but I'm deliberately erring on the generous side.

IIRC, configuring each 128 pages requires four bytes.   By my 
probably-bad memory and probably-equally-bad math, configuring 262144 
GBLPAGES requires committing ONE PAGE of Alpha or Itanium memory.  
Over-configuring has very low costs, and avoids hassles later.  In 
short, crank it.

> There was a known problem with that parameter in earlier versions of 
> VMS where DECwindows would see a shortage, and try to remedy it by 
> adding an entry to MODPARAMS.DAT (or maybe one of the INCLUDEd Autogen 
> files - I forget the precise details), but fail to do so correctly.

IIRC, that morass amounted to missed testing and two sources of truth; 
the checks and the adjustments.  The parameter addition did not match 
the requirements of the parameter test.   The layered product software 
tests missed this case entirely.   Rinse, lather, repeat.

This is part of why I think how AUTOGEN and the layered product 
installs should be overhauled, and particularly support for application 
profiles added.   Register the system parameters and the user settings 
at install, then adjust the parameters post-installation and reboot if 
needed, and check the quotas at image startup.

Having rolled out explicit process and parameter quota checks into 
applications and seen the resulting and massive decreases in weird 
errors, the current design and current interface is far too dependent 
on the correct operations of humans.  The resulting errors secondary to 
quota depletions tend to be awful to troubleshoot, too.

But I digress.

Quota limits and parameter limits and related decisions need to be 
periodically re-evaluated, lest they become impediments to easier 
operations, and for what can become no positive values.  In three to 
five years, if the users don't have servers with eight or sixteen 
gigabytes — that's typical of decent-grade x86-64 laptops now, and new 
x86-64 servers with a terabyte of RAM are now priced at US$15K to 
US$20K, after all — then start down the path to require memory hardware 
upgrades or to de-support those older and under-configured boxes on 
newer releases.  Relegate the old and under-configured boxes that can't 
be upgraded to long-term support releases, or schedule and de-support 
them.  Or don't support underconfigured boxes to start with.

With x86-64, we are NOT in the same hardware world that VAX, Alpha or 
even Itanium existed in.

But I digress, again.

Related <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1374> 
<http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/461>


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