pre-2.0.31-1 crash

Jon Lewis (jlewis@inorganic5.fdt.net)
Mon, 9 Jun 1997 19:19:54 -0400 (EDT)


I was just trying to wipe a disk clean before returning it to Micropolis,
and did:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=10240 count=419328

It ran for a bit, and wiped out parts of /dev/sdb, but the system started
thrashing the boot disk a bit, so I stopped it, echo'd 512 1024 1536 to
freepages, and tried again. It ran longer the second time, but eventually
started doing lots of access on the boot/swap disk and then started
spitting out lots of:

try_to_free_page: state(0) stop(9) i(xxx) sleep instead of fail

xxx started as a small number but was growing large and negative. I let
it run this way for a bit, and noticed the keyboard seemed totally dead.
After a few minutes of this scrolling, I hit the reset button.

The system used was my tomcat II dual P120, 64mb RAM, both disks on a
BT-946, running an SMP kernel without any of the special SMP deadlock
patches.

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