[Sheflug] VM problems in kernel 2.4

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

This is for those that don't read kernel traffic or the kernel mailing list 
-- I don't know how many of you there are on here...from 
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html

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2. Serious Problems With Current 2.4 Kernels

9 May - 15 May (14 posts) Archive Link: 2.4.4 kernel freeze for unknown 
reason

Jacky Liu kept experiencing what appeared to be random lockups every couple 
days under 2.4.4; Vincent Stemen [*] confirmed:

"I have been experiencing these same problems since version 2.4.0. 
Although, I I think it has improved a little in 2.4.4, it still locks up. 
The problem seems to be related to memory management and/or swap, and is 
seems to do it primarily on machines with over 128Mb of RAM. Although, I 
have not tested systematically enough to confirm this.

"I have been monitoring the memory usage constantly with the gnome memory 
usage meter and noticed that as swap grows it is never freed back up. I can 
kill off most of the large applications, such as netscape, xemacs, etc, and 
little or no memory and swap will be freed. Once swap is full after a few 
days, my machine will lock up.

"If I turn swap off all together or turn it off and back on periodically to 
clear the swap before it gets full, I do not seem to experience the lockups.

"I am running on an AMD K6-400 with 256 Mb RAM but we have experienced 
these problems with various other machines as well."

Alan Cox [*] replied cryptically, "The swap handling in 2.4 is somewhat 
hosed at the moment." He added, "I can give you a tiny patch that should 
fix the lockups and instead it will kill processes out of memory but thats 
obviously not the actual fix 8)" Later, he also said, "I switched my 
desktop box back to 2.2 a while back until the VM works." Yikes!

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If AC's flipped back to a 2.2 kernel, those of you concerned about 
stability *might* want to consider doing similar. I don't use 2.4, so I 
can't recommend anything - I'll leave that to those on this list running 
2.4 :)

Chris...



-- 
Chris Johnson            \  "If not for me then, do it for yourself. If not
sixie@nccnet.co.uk        \  for then do it for the world." -- Stevie Nicks
www.nccnet.co.uk/~sixie/   ~---------------------------------------+
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