Heavy swap bug in 2.0.35 - 2.0.36pre12

Hubert Tonneau (tonneau.heliosam@hol.fr)
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 18:19:38 +0000


I have noticed that with 2.0.35 (or 2.0.36pre12) kernel, heavy swapping
in a process may generate a general protection fault in another one !

I can repoduce the problem at any time:

1) i open two nxterm session.

2) in the first one, i run a program that will consume very much
memory (130 Mb whereas the physical memory is 64 Mb), then access
randomly all the memor.

3) in the second session, i just do some 'ls'
It will generate segmentation fault as long as the first session
is heavily swapping.

Please find below the report of the second nxterm session.

bash# ls -l /database/
total 60726
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5094086 Sep 25 19:28 heliosam.linux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56843448 Sep 23 12:03 heliosam.os2
bash# ls -l /database/
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
bash# ls -l /database/
total 56731
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1019904 Sep 29 16:31 heliosam.linux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56843448 Sep 23 12:03 heliosam.os2
bash#

While typing the first 'ls' the machine was not very much loaded,
while typping the second, a process was swapping intensively,
while typing the third, the heavy swapping process had been killed.

Extra information:

- i am running on an SMP box

- the problem does not occure with 2.1.12x kernel

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