Re: OOM with hackbench against next 0708

From: Sachin Sant
Date: Fri Jul 10 2009 - 03:04:51 EST


Dave Hansen wrote:
This doesn't look like a kernel bug at all to me. You're out of memory,
out of swap, and the thing that got killed was the thing allocating
memory. You're also down to 65MB of pagecache, which is awfully low for
a 6GB machine. That tells me it's also been effective in reclaiming
disk cache.

There are a couple of possibilities:
1. hackbench is broken, allocating too much memory and ooming, or it
has been misconfigured by a user
2. hackbench broke because something the kernel is telling it is wrong
3. The kernel is leaking (or just plain using) some memory more than a
few releases ago, and that caused the oom.

I'd go back and carefully examine how hackbench is being run and that it
is consistent. You should also double-check your finding that the
several-day-old -next isn't seeing this issue.
Thanks Dave for the pointers.

I am able to consistently recreate this issue with next 0708. hackbench
creates 3600 tasks in my case. After starting the tests machine becomes
unresponsive and i finally have to reboot it.

The test ran successfully on next03, but unfortunately i did
not save the config file for that run. If i use the config file from
0708 and compile a 0703, the machine becomes unresponsive because
of OOM's. I can't explain why the test ran successfully against
0703 :-( in previous attempt.

Only data point i have at this time is the same tests runs successfully
against 2.6.31-rc2. But may be that's not even an argument :-)

Thanks
-Sachin



--

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Sachin Sant
IBM Linux Technology Center
India Systems and Technology Labs
Bangalore, India
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