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<a href="./Home">MLton 20130715</a>
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<h1>RunningOnNetBSD</h1>
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<div id="preamble">
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>MLton runs fine on <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/">NetBSD</a>.</p></div>
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<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_installing_the_correct_packages_for_netbsd">Installing the correct packages for NetBSD</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>The NetBSD system installs 3rd party packages by a mechanism known as
pkgsrc. This is a tree of Makefiles which when invoked downloads the
source code, builds a package and installs it on the system. In order
to run MLton on NetBSD, you will have to install several packages for
it to work:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<span class="monospaced">shells/bash</span>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<span class="monospaced">devel/gmp</span>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<span class="monospaced">devel/gmake</span>
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>In order to get graphical call-graphs of profiling information, you
will need the additional package</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<span class="monospaced">graphics/graphviz</span>
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>To build the documentation for MLton, you will need the addtional
package</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<span class="monospaced">htmldoc</span>.
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
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<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_tips_for_compiling_and_using_mlton_on_netbsd">Tips for compiling and using MLton on NetBSD</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>MLton can be a memory-hog on computers with little memory.  While
640Mb of RAM ought to be enough to self-compile MLton one might want
to do some tuning to the NetBSD VM subsystem in order to succeed.  The
notes presented here is what <a href="JesperLouisAndersen">JesperLouisAndersen</a> uses for
compiling MLton on his laptop.</p></div>
<div class="sect2">
<h3 id="_the_netbsd_vm_subsystem">The NetBSD VM subsystem</h3>
<div class="paragraph"><p>NetBSD uses a VM subsystem named
<a href="http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/pub/chuck/tech/uvm/">UVM</a>.
<a href="http://www.selonen.org/arto/netbsd/vm_tune.html">Tuning the VM system</a>
can be done via the <span class="monospaced">sysctl(8)</span>-interface with the "VM" MIB set.</p></div>
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<div class="sect2">
<h3 id="_tuning_the_netbsd_vm_subsystem_for_mlton">Tuning the NetBSD VM subsystem for MLton</h3>
<div class="paragraph"><p>MLton uses a lot of anonymous pages when it is running. Thus, we will
need to tune up the default of 80 for anonymous pages.  Setting</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content monospaced">
<pre>sysctl -w vm.anonmax=95
sysctl -w vm.anonmin=50
sysctl -w vm.filemin=2
sysctl -w vm.execmin=2
sysctl -w vm.filemax=4
sysctl -w vm.execmax=4</pre>
</div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>makes it less likely for the VM system to swap out anonymous pages.
For a full explanation of the above flags, see the documentation.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The result is that my laptop goes from a MLton compile where it swaps
a lot to a MLton compile with no swapping.</p></div>
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