2.3.99-pre6-3: Swapper bug?

From: Tim N. van der Leeuw,,, (t.n.vanderleeuw@chello.nl)
Date: Fri Apr 21 2000 - 04:04:50 EST


Hello,

The other day I was compiling some KDE2 packages, in fact I was
compiling two different KDE2 packages at the same time. I was also using
my computer more-or-less normally, with X-Windows etc.
The machine has only 64Mb of RAM, so one can imagine that the system's
memory was horribly overloaded. In order not to run out of swap, I had
added two 200-Mb files to the swap space.

I noticed that one of the compilations took a rather long time, even
considering the circumstances, and this is what I found in my top:

   6:53pm up 1 day, 17:34, 9 users, load average: 1.21, 1.08, 1.25
59 processes: 57 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 6.2% user, 93.7% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 62360K av, 53928K used, 8432K free, 0K shrd, 1276K buff
Swap: 510348K av, 58580K used, 451768K free 41360K cached

   PID USER PRI NI SIZE SWAP RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM CTIME COMMAND
  8484 root 16 0 34176 33M 8 8 R 98.4 0.0 73:18 cc1plus
22708 tnl 3 0 872 0 872 624 R 1.7 1.3 0:03 top
     1 root 0 0 108 44 64 52 S 0.0 0.1 581:17 init
     2 root 0 0 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:08 kapmd
     3 root 0 0 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:54 kswapd
     4 root 0 0 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:05 kflushd
     5 root 0 0 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:02 kupdate
   105 daemon 0 0 80 76 4 4 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 portmap

(sorry for the horirble line-wrappings)
Only one of the compilation sessions was still running, and as you can
make out, it ate most of the CPU while being completely swapped out. All
CPU time was going to system.

I aborted, rebooted to 2.2.15pre and have not yet tried to reproduce it
yet; upon shutdown my xfs-tt crashed the kernel (like many others have
posted) and I got loads of fsck warnings.
So I'm rather hoping that this kernel-bug triggered by xfs-tt is fixed
soon! :-)

I'm sorry that I don't have any more information that might be useful,
nor a reproducible testcase.
The machine is a p200mmx with 64Mb RAM and 2 IDE disks.

greets,

--Tim

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 23 2000 - 21:00:18 EST