Bug#838913: libc6: There's probably a bug in libpthread, affecting several user programs.

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Aurelien Jarno:

> Hmm, rsync doesn't use libpthread, so that clearly rules out a
> libpthread issue. That said, all the example you gave fail to allocate
> the memory correctly, either through malloc (glibc) or mmap (kernel)
> which returns -ENOMEM. This points to either a kernel issue, or a
> limitation of the memory using for example ulimit.

The mm subsystem in the 4.7 upstream kernel has a very visible issue
which causes allocation failures:

  <http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=147422898523307>

There are other threads as well.  (I personally see this with the
xfs_inode cache.)

Usually it manifests in premature OOM killer invocations, but maybe
something the reporter's system configuration changes that (perhaps it
runs with vm.overcommit_memory=2?).