Re: MM bug

Regis DUCHESNE (regis@via.ecp.fr)
Wed, 29 May 1996 11:11:46 +0200 (MET DST)

> You can simply crash the system by issuing "grep any_string /dev/zero".
> As the lines in /dev/zero have infinite length, grep tries to allocate still more
> memory for its line buffer until the memory is exhausted. But no out of memory
> message appear and the system gets frozen (interrupts work, but normal processes

Yes, my system crashes too.

Is this a kernel or a grep problem?
(i'm running gnu_grep-2.0 and pre-2.0.4)

If it is a kernel problem, let me add some details:
I have a 50Mo swap partition, and before the crash, i
heared a big swap activity, and suddenly, my system hung.

PS: an other thing quite strange: just after this crash has happened,
i reboot my system, and then i got some "insufficient memory" error
messages. I thought i was because the swap was full before the crash
and hadn't been cleaned. Is possible or am i totally crazy?
After a second reboot, things happened normally.

---
Regis "HPReg" DUCHESNE, Engineering Student at ***** ******** *****
E-Mail > regis@via.ecp.fr
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