I'm trying to do some vm tuning for diskless (and therefore swapless)
devices. (I'm working on a distro that tftp's packages and runs
entirely in RAM)
Even on an X terminal with 64MB RAM, badly behaved apps can use lots of
ram in the Xserver, and what I'm seeing is a hang. The box is usually
still pingable, just unresponsive. I'm using cramfs pretty heavily, and
I think what's occuring is that the terminal gets too low on freepages,
and since pages used by X can't be swapped out, the box starts thrashing
the vm and is unable to get pages to uncompress into.
My first thought was echo (bigger numbers) > /proc/sys/vm/freepages -
but lo! - it's not writable anymore. I found comments in page_alloc.c
indicating it had to be read-only, but it seems it's only a safety
precaution. Something along the lines of values too small being 'bad
bad'.
help?
David
-- David L. Parsley Network Administrator Roanoke College - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/