memory & filesystem corruption under heavy load?

garth zenie (gzenie@espresso.hampshire.edu)
Fri, 05 Apr 1996 01:07:57 -0500


On Wed, 3 Apr 1996 17:47:56 +0200 (MET DST) Jochen Karrer wrote:

> Everithing works fine with 1.2.13, but
> i can reproduce this error with Kernel 1.3.57.
> I never got a segfault in gcc, but I sometimes get corrupted headerfiles.
> I think something with the pagecache is wrong. After
> I got an error because off a bad include file, I inspected it with
> vi, and it was really destroyed. Then I started about 30 xmosaic at the
> same time, and then killed them. This seemed to clear the pagecache, because
> memory was low. The include file was no longer corrupted afterwards.

i have similiar, perhaps related problems. the system is a p166
w/32mb or ram, buslogic bt-948, conner scsi drive, etc.

i can repeatedly, without fail, achieve filesystem corruption under
1.3.72-82 by unpacking two previously gunzip'd linux kernel source
trees while cat'ing eight copies of /dev/mem into seperate files
(probably don't even need to do all of that, it seems to happen by
itself just by unpacking a single source tree). running a diff over the
source trees reveals massive file damage.

no matter how hard i try, i cannot get filesystem damage to occur
under 1.2.13 (and believe me - i tried pretty hard) ...

-- garth