One of my friends has the same problem on 2.0.34. Being new to Linux/UNIX,
he partitioned with 15 megabytes of swap on his 32 megabyte machine.
Within an hour or so, the machine would crash. I helped him turn off swap
permanently and it has been stable for the past week.
X Windows is a good stress test. X+GNOME+WM+Netscape amounted to so much
bloat that thats what usually crashed the machine. Open a few million
netscape proceses, and a few gimps or whatever until it crashes or no more
processes will start due to lack of memory. If you get into a low memory
situation, start browsing in one of the netscapes. Make sure it has a
large RAM cache size :).
On Thu, 31 Dec 1998, John Kennedy wrote:
> 12/31/98 @ 10:32:18 AM (Thursday)
>
> Some more datapoints, and a possible smoking gun.
>
> After 2.2.0-pre1 came out, I put the 2nd processor back into the machine
> and crashed it about 20 times trying to catch it in the act.
>
> The machine is stable, in general, if:
>
> o Only one of the two CPUs is used
> o You mount the partitions as sync (not good test; can't stress it)
>
> Same (SMP) kernel, all other things held constant.
>
>
> I spent most of yesterday trying to get it up on a serial console on the
> theory that if it would spit out any messages on that, I wouldn't have them
> disappear when the machine rebooted and/or otherwise froze. I never did
> get it to output it to the console, but I did get one message on the VGA
> console during one lockup (vs reboot):
>
> swap_duplicate: entry 0b190000, offset exceeds max
>
> Hmm. Swapping problems would happen while compiling but not under idle
> use, so I tried to abuse that. I did repeated kernel builds under things
> like -j32 and -j64 (both worked) where just -j failed (ran out of virtual
> memory, didn't write down exact error; typical fork issue).
>
> Since this tends to happen an hour+ into my build, perhaps memory needs
> to be more scrambled by use to trigger the problem. I have never seen
> my new box use much swap, but that isn't surprising since I now have more
> memory than I used to have combined memory & swap.
>
>
> As I said, my ASUS P2B-DS is an upgrade over my previous system. The
> previous system had 64MB of RAM, then was later upgraded to 96MB. The
> new system has 256MB. I did keep the old disk drive, and was using the
> old swap partition:
>
> Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1106 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/sdb6 326 338 104391 82 Linux swap
>
> No swap on /dev/sda. Sized Ok for 64MB and still more than 96, but
> less than 256. The only reason I'm using that is because it was there
> already and it seemed better than having no swap at all (at the time).
>
> That was ~2AM last night, so I did a swapoff -a and restarted the big
> build. Got up this morning and it had finished it, no crashes (but
> only one test; I rebuilt 6-9 times on one CPU before I decided that was
> probably Ok).
>
> Am I getting crashes because I have less swap than physical memory?
>
> --- john
>
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