Re: HELP! VM?

[Phil Brutsche <pbrutsch@tux.creighton.edu>]

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> Hello everyone...
> Right back from work, seeing that our file / print server running Debian
> 2.2r1 lately is, like, DOS'ing itself frequently each day while filling the
> local tty same as the log files with error messages like
>
> VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for <process-name>
>
> For what I already know about Linux kernel, I assume that VM == virtual
> memory management, and I also more or less understood this paging thing...
> My question: *Why* is this happening, where to lay my hands on to get this
> fixed? Is it a problem of my system RAM, of the swap partition or of system
> kernel on this rather strange system motherboard (some older system out of
> a former server by Acer ....)?
> It's sort of annoying, this thing, since each time the system is spitting
> out those messages, the server is not available for any network or local
> request... Any help, hints or whatever would be kindly appreciated. :)

This is a known problem with kernels 2.2.17 and 2.2.18.

The solution is to use a different kernel revision.  I've had very good
results with 2.2.16 (which theoretically has the do_try_to_free_pages
problem, but has never manifested itself), and the 2.2.19 prereleases
(2.2.19pre14 is current) have an actual fix for the problem.

It's reported that 2.2.19 will be official this week.

I've also had good luck with the new 2.4.x series of kernels.  Keep in
mind that 2.4.x is not officially supported on Debian 2.2, thus Debian 2.2
will need a few updates for 2.4.x to work correctly.

If you decide to go with 2.4.x, go with 2.4.2 as there are security & disk
corruption problems fixed in that release.

- -- 
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Phil Brutsche				    pbrutsch@tux.creighton.edu

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