VM breakdown, 2.4.0 family

[David Ford]

Since the testN series and up through ac12, I experience total loss of
control when memory is nearly exhausted.

I start with 256M and eat it up with programs until there is only about
7 megs left, no swap.  From that point all user processes stall and the
disk begins to grind nonstop.  It will continue to grind for about 25-30
minutes until it goes completely silent.  No processes get killed, no VM
messages are emitted.

The only recourse is the magic key.  If I reboot before the disk goes
silent I can cleanly kill X with sysrq-E and restart.

If I wait until it goes silent, all is lost.  I have to sysrq-SUB.

Note, I do not have ANY swap enabled for these tests.

SysRq: Show Memory
Mem-info:
Free pages:       22124kB (     0kB HighMem)
( Active: 3427, inactive_dirty: 521, inactive_clean: 0, free: 5531 (383
766 1149) )
282*4kB 55*8kB 5*16kB 0*32kB 0*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 1*512kB 0*1024kB
0*2048kB = 2160kB)
1769*4kB 795*8kB 156*16kB 56*32kB 21*64kB 1*128kB 1*256kB 1*512kB
0*1024kB 0*2048kB = 19964kB)
= 0kB)
Swap cache: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0
Free swap:            0kB
65532 pages of RAM
0 pages of HIGHMEM
2113 reserved pages
3981 pages shared
0 pages swap cached
0 pages in page table cache
Buffer memory:     2780kB

Note the "= 0kB)" line in the middle?  Is printk() data missing?  how
about the mismatched ( to )?

-d

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