Re: Core dumps & restarting

Bradley M Keryan (keryan@andrew.cmu.edu)
Tue, 29 Oct 1996 16:51:27 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Bryn Paul Arnold Jones wrote:
<SNIP>
> Hmm, I'm suprised that other OS's can't do this (or can you keep a totally
> swaped out process "running" over a reboot ?), I would have thought that
> an OS that needs a 'shutdown -r now' in it's crontab to avoid running out
> of memory due to leaks.
I remember a program for the Amiga that would swap a process entirely into
a file on disk so that you could continue it later (even after a reboot)
but it had a lot of trouble with memory fragmentation. I think the only
times you could restore a process were after a fresh reboot (if you were
lucky) or right after you swapped it to disk, so it was not very useful.

Also, I noticed last year on a system running Linux 1.2.1 that
occasionally after the system crashed (the CPU fan burnt out, causing
numerous random crashes before I discovered what was wrong), it seemed
that some memory was paged in from the swapfile on the next reboot, as
shown by some very informal testing during which I did something to the
extent of "swapoff /dev/hdxx; mkswap /dev/hdxx; shutdown -r now".

>
> > (Of course, real Linux users never reboot or shut down, except for a
> > hardware or kernel upgrade ;)
> >
> Don't forget power failure, and electrical storms ;)
> Bryn
One word: UPS.

> --
> PGP key pass phrase forgotten, \ Overload -- core meltdown sequence
> again :( and I don't care ;) | initiated.
> / This space is intentionally left
> | blank, apart from this text ;-)
> \____________________________________
>

Brad Keryan | keryan@andrew.cmu.edu | http://fatale.res.cmu.edu/
Vote for Satan! Why choose the lesser of evils?