From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 11:31:31 +0100 From: "Stephen C. Tweedie" Subject: [torriem@cs.byu.edu: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed in 2.2.17] Message-ID: <20000918113131.J10210@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-mm@kvack.org Cc: Michael L Torrie List-ID: Hi all, Yet another 2.2.17-eats-my-VM report. Does anyone have proven patches other than reverting completely to the old 2.2 VM? There's been lots of discussion and hypothesising but no silver bullets so far. --Stephen ----- Forwarded message from Michael L Torrie ----- Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 23:11:51 -0600 (MDT) From: Michael L Torrie To: sct@redhat.com Subject: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed in 2.2.17 If you're not the right man to talk to, couldyou forward this onto the kernel mailing list? Your name was on the source code, so I guess you are the person who wrote it, unless I have the wrong Steve Tweedie. Forgive me for not writing to the mailing list, but the traffic level prohibits my subscribing. In any case, On three separate occasions, on 2 different machines, I've had the kernel report: Sep 16 22:19:35 enterprise kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for sawfish.. and for many different programs. Basically the kernel just spins out of control and the whole machine locks up. I understand this was a bug in the 2.2.16 series, but thought it had been fixes in the 2.2.17 series. I need to report the bug is alive and well. Programs that I know don't have memory leaks (they've run fro months in the past) suddenly appear to be consuming huge amounts of ram and swap until the machine thrashes to a halt. Perhaps the VM code cannot or does not release pages correctly. It appears that programs that do a lot of dynamic allocation will suffer. XMMS brought down the system in 15 minutes one time. I've also had this happen on a server running the same processor with Reiserfs. I had to cold restart it. From watching the system (It has 2 GB of ram and 2 GB of swap so it takes a few days to get to that point), every once in a while, the kswapd will do some sort of massive swap, which interrupts nfs service, and in fact all operation. Is that normal? If I need to be clearer or provide more information, please let me know. I'd appreciate if this problem would receive attention, as I want my machine to stay up for more than several days, and I don't want to have to reboot my server, ever. thank you very much. Michael Torrie BYU CS System Programmer ---- ----- End forwarded message ----- -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/