Re: [debian-knoppix] Undefined behaviour after some uptime
On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 04:57:52PM +0100, Klaus Knopper wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 01:13:41PM +0100, Nils Magnus wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I encounter periodically problems after running Knoppix for either a
> > longer time [...]
>
> If a program allocates a huge amount of memory temporarily, the kernel
> may kill other running processes instead of just denying the memory
> allocation. This can also happen when a temporary file is created on
> the scalable /ramdisk. In general, the tempfs seems to be flaky some
> times if no swap space is available.
I doubt that, at least in more recent kernels, see next mail.
> But in case of crashing applications, I suspect something else.
> Please try a dmesg dump on the console to see if there were
> decompression errors. The power management of your notebook may disable
> the IDE controller on suspend/wakeup for a while, which may result in
> physical read errors. Normally, cloop handles this quite well, but the
> applications can't page in static data from the CD anymore, which could
> explain the crashes.
As I wrote in my mail and my report, respectively, the dmesg was clean.
The situation occurs to me only in times of busy operation, whereas
longer periods of idle time have no negative impact.
> If you get a complete IO freeze, this is probably related to cloop in
> connection with a yet to be found error on the io request queue of the
> Linux kernel (all IO requests with physical IO seem to be blocked for
> some reason, which is a rather strange phenomenon. Reads/Writes to the
> ramdisk still work fine). It happens rather seldom, though, and only on
> specific boards/controllers.
I never experienced a freeze, that was never of a problem. The system
may have felt a little inresponsive, but that is intrisically a feature
of Knoppix since pages from the CDROM are paged in. I also doubt the
myth of the kernel bug at least in that respect since there is no
evidence for this whatsoever.
Regards,
Nils Magnus
Program-Chair LinuxTag 2003 Free Conference Program
LinuxTag 2003: Where .com meets .org - magnus@linuxtag.org
_______________________________________________
debian-knoppix mailing list
debian-knoppix@linuxtag.org
http://mailman.linuxtag.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-knoppix
Reply to: