I have done a bit more work on the problem I reported in my message
"Crashes reading and writing to disk". To recap, on a machine with
8GB of RAM, either
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1G count=10 | split -b 1073741824
or
find /bigfulldisk -type f -exec cat {} \; > /dev/null
can reliably cause a crash. In my naive view, it seems like once a
certain amount of memory is being completely used for disk buffer
(cache, whatever, excuse my not knowing the proper term) the kernel
gets very confused and dies. The dd dies after having written about
4.5GB.
Booting the machine with mem=3000M avoids the crashes. I haven't done
a binary search to determine what the maximum amount of memory I can
use is before the problem exhibits itself. Hopefully this provides a
hint as to what could be causing the problem. If any more information
would be useful, please ask.
To go along with this, are there any parameters in /proc/sys/vm/* that
I could tune to avoid these crashes?
-- Thanks, Jeff Lessem. - 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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 23 2001 - 21:00:07 EST