Bug#695182: Write couple of 1GB files for OOM crash

[paul.szabo@sydney.edu.au]

Dear Jonathan,

Thanks again for your help in writing "correct" and "acceptable"
patches. I did change a few things, hopefully for the better.

I decided not to "push" the drop-caches part of my patch; because it
now seems to me that it is not the "essence" of the issue: it protects
against OOM when writing a few files, but does not protect when running
a few sleeps. I am coming back to the idea that this is some
signed-vs-unsigned or similar issue... though I could not find it yet!

---

Using the amd64 kernel seems a "workable" workaround for the OOM issue.

Cheers, Paul

Paul Szabo   psz@maths.usyd.edu.au   http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/
School of Mathematics and Statistics   University of Sydney    Australia