Re: VM breakdown, 2.4.0 family

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, David Ford wrote:

> 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.
> 

Could you try this patch and tell the result?

http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~marcelo/patches/v2.4/2.4.1pre10/bg_page_aging.patch

Thanks