Large ramdisk crashes 2.4.8

[Paul Buder]

A large ramdisk will either crash or make useless a
2.4.8 kernel.  I did the following.

I cleared out buffered memory by running this till it
appropiately died.
perl -e "$x='x' x 10000 while 1"

top then said I was using 7 megs of ram on my 128 meg box.

I then did

mke2fs /dev/ram0 70000
mount /dev/ram0 /mnt
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/junk bs=1024000 count=100

Usually at this point my system was not totally crashed but may as well
have been.  I could usually ping the box.  I could sometimes switch
virtual consoles though I couldn't log in.  I could press keys and they
would display on the console.  That's about it.  Once I got a kernel
panic. I also tried allocating 500 megs on a 1 gig box I have available
to me with similar results.

I reported similar problems with 2.4.[4-7] though the symptoms were
a little different.  At this point I've consigned myself to wasting
2/3 of my memory.  I won't report further on this issue unless someone
is interested.