Re: Small System Paging Problem - OOM-killer goes nuts

From: Josh Goldsmith
Date: Mon Nov 26 2007 - 00:28:41 EST


Thanks for the response Mikael.

Is your 486 running a IDE disk on a normal interface or via USB? I wonder if the NSLU2 only having I/O via USB might be significant. Also, this is a 2.6 kernel and I've seen spurious reports across the internet about similar oom-killer problems since about 2.6.7.

Thanks!
-Josh

----- Original Message ----- From: "Mikael Pettersson" <mikpe@xxxxxxxx>
To: <joshin@xxxxxxxxxxx>; <linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2007 3:55 PM
Subject: Re: Small System Paging Problem - OOM-killer goes nuts


I'm no VM tuning expert, but I have and still do heavy compile
jobs on similarly configured machines, with no OOM problems:

I regularly build 2.6 kernels and occasionally also gcc on a
100MHz 486 with 28MB of RAM and perhaps 500MB of swap. It runs
a standard but stripped down Fedora Core 4 user-space, with ext3
file systems and a kernel that doesn't include anything non-essential.
The machine will swap madly, but the OOM killer never triggers.
(All system settings are FC4 defaults. I haven't touched them.)

In the past I did a fair amount of package rebuilds and test suite
runs on an NSLU2 myself, with a 2.4 Linksys/Openslug kernel, ext3,
and a 1GB or perhaps 2GB swap partition on a disk attached via a
USB2-to-PATA enclosure. Even when swapping heavily the OOM killer
wouldn't trigger.


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