Re: why does the kernel suck up memory?
On Tue, Mar 31, 1998 at 12:18:19AM -0600, Mike Brownlow wrote:
>
> I am having the reverse problem on my machine at work. It doesn't
> want to use the swap partition at all unless I force it to. I
> suppose that is a good thing, but what about:
>
> When I go into work I'll switch virt. consoles or type in an
> xterm and *poof*, there goes the X server. Then I try to run X
> again and it quits just as it's about to spawn the window manager.
> Then after I reboot, X starts up fine. This has happened every day
> since I've ftp-installed debian 1.3.
>
> On my previous dist I wrote a program in c that when run as root
> from a console will allocate all of my available memory and swap
> and then free it up. After doing this I was able to start X again.
> But I lost the code when I moved from redhat -> debian. The reason
> I had the code on redhat was for the same problem. But it occured
> infrequently.
>
> Is there something I should upgrade? I have been planning to
> upgrade Xfree86 to 3.3.2 but I am still a newbie with dselect, etc.
> I would compile it from source but the same problems happen during
> a compile. I had to reboot several times to get the kde and kernel
> sources to finish.
>
This looks very similar to the problem I had before I changed my
motherboard (or before I switched off 2nd level cache on my old
motherboard). I.e., I suspect it is a hardware problem. How does the
compilation stop, with signal 11?
I am using a script which compiles the kernel 100 times to test my
hardware. I had a probability of a signal 11 crash of gcc about every
3 or 4 times. When a crash happened, further invocations of gcc would
usually crash immediately, so the remainder of the loop ran through
very quickly. To get better statistics, I added a program like you
describe after each compilation. This has the effect of forcing the
(presumably damaged) gcc executable out of the memory buffer and a
reload of a fresh copy from disk, so the loop could continue.
BTW, can someone explain the difference between "buffers" and "cached"
to me?
--
Klaus Wacker wacker@Physik.Uni-Dortmund.DE
51°29'9"N 7°25'9"E http://www.physik.uni-dortmund.de/~wacker
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