Bug#290398: kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686: USB memory starts oom_killer, then hangs the machine
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Package: kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686
Version: 2.6.8-13
Followup-For: Bug #290398
I have plugged my new toy, a 1 GB USB memory stick, into a couple of
Debian testing boxes. When I try to copy a file bigger than the amount
of RAM available to the system, 512 MB in both cases, available memory
(as reported by ksysguard) starts to shrink, while memory used for
buffers grows; after a while, all memory is used up for buffers, the
oom_killer starts randomly killing processes, and everything slows to a
crawl.
Copying with "rcp" and limiting the bandwidth to, say, 1 MB/s only slows
the process, with the same result. Once I could kill the copying process,
and the system recovered after a
while. Usually I have to hard-boot the machine, since not even the
console nor ssh is responding. It would seem that the oom_killer is
killing something which is then reloaded from disk, leaving the machine
in an unusable state.
In short, the problem happens in Debian testing when copying files bigger
than the amount of RAM to a USB stick. Let me know if you need any further info.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Versions of packages kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686 depends on:
ii coreutils [fileutils] 5.2.1-2 The GNU core utilities
ii initrd-tools 0.1.77 tools to create initrd image for p
ii module-init-tools 3.2-pre1-2 tools for managing Linux kernel mo
-- no debconf information
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