virtual memory problems in pre10

Mike Kilburn (mike@conexio.co.za)
Sun, 28 Sep 1997 17:17:09 +0200 (SAT)


>Only for a re check ... please could you try the appended patch from
>Krzysztof Strasburger against pre-patch-2.0.31-10? And please run a

That patch fixes the problem.

> grep Couldn /var/log/messages

I never had any of these messages.

> to check also the behaviour of the previous pre patch levels.

pre10-2.0.31 - fails
pre10-2.0.31 + Strasburger - works

I have a zImage from a previous patch level that also works but I dont know
which patch it is. Its one of pre9,pre9+p10 or pre9+p10-2. I think it is
pre9+p10-2. If someone could email me p10 and p10-2 I could check this out.
I will get pre9 again as soon as ftp.kernel.org is back.

The test I am doing now is different than the one I first reported because
that one takes too long to reproduce a failure. Now I do the following:

- Fresh boot into single user mode ['linux single' on the lilo cm line]
- cd /usr/src/linux
- make dep; make clean; make -j zImage

The failure is very reproduceable, happens every time.

The system is a Cyrix 166+ with 64M RAM and 50M swap. There is nearly 60M free
when the make begins. That gives > 100M virtual memory with no other programs
running during the make.

Originally I was doing 'make dep; make clean; make zImage' from a dtterm under
CDE. While the make was proceeding I would usually just be running a text editor
in another workspace and a few telnet sessions to other hosts. Occasionally I
would bring up a memory intensive app (ishmail with lots of mailboxes). There
was always lots of free memory (swap used = 0) when the failure occurred. I
never saw the original failure until pre10 and even then its very rare.