Re: 2.6.25-rc3: 34TB vmalloc total -- overflow in /proc/meminfo?

From: Christian Kujau
Date: Wed Mar 05 2008 - 17:11:47 EST


On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Hugh Dickins wrote:
I don't see what Pavel's issue is with this: it's simply a fact that
with a 64-bit kernel, we've lots of virtual address space to spare
for vmalloc. What would be surprising is for VmallocUsed to get up
as high as that.

OK, thanks for the clarification.

Completely different and much more interesting.

Well, if it's "interesting"...here are some more details from the box:

http://nerdbynature.de/bits/2.6.19.2/

Unlikely. Offhand I'm not quite sure that's impossible, but it's far
more likely that we've a kernel bug and vm_committed_space has wrapped
negative.

Huh. When I first saw this I thought "kernel bug" too, but then read the
documentation to Committed_AS I thought it's just userspace related...

Ancient as your kernel is, I don't notice anything in the ChangeLogs
since then to say we've fixed a bug of that kind since 2.6.19.
Any idea how to reproduce this?

Well, the box is running fine and since it's a production machine I don't intend to reboot the box very often. And since it's really an old kernel (for lkml discussion, that is) I don't intend to debug this one further. I really was only curious if this was userspace related (some app overcommitting) or some kernel weirdness.

Are you using HugePages at all?

I have:

# CONFIG_HUGETLBFS is not set
# CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE is not set

...was this, what you meant?

Thanks,
Christian.
--
BOFH excuse #340:

Well fix that in the next (upgrade, update, patch release, service pack).
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