Re: [debian-knoppix] Undefined behaviour after some uptime
On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 01:13:41PM +0100, Nils Magnus wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I encounter periodically problems after running Knoppix for either a
> longer time or when running memory consuming applications like mozilla,
> ethereal with large dumps, ettercap or stuff like that. At times either
> those applications or the KDE components seem to crash.
>
> I would expect the kernel to deny allocation of new pages/processes if
> there is not enough memory left but rather not crashing arbitrarily
> applications. Has anyone else experienced this behavior? Personally, I
> suspect some improper assumptions in the cloop, but have not tracked
> that one down yet.
>
> Find attached a report that shows that mozilla denies to start at all
> without any errors. The system is an IBM Thinkpad 390X, 192MB RAM,
> 400Mhz PII. Running 3.1 HE. There are no entries in the dmesg. JFYI.
If a program allocates a huge amount of memory temporarily, the kernel
may kill other running processes instead of just denying the memory
allocation. This can also happen when a temporary file is created on
the scalable /ramdisk. In general, the tempfs seems to be flaky some
times if no swap space is available.
But in case of crashing applications, I suspect something else.
Please try a dmesg dump on the console to see if there were
decompression errors. The power management of your notebook may disable
the IDE controller on suspend/wakeup for a while, which may result in
physical read errors. Normally, cloop handles this quite well, but the
applications can't page in static data from the CD anymore, which could
explain the crashes.
If you get a complete IO freeze, this is probably related to cloop in
connection with a yet to be found error on the io request queue of the
Linux kernel (all IO requests with physical IO seem to be blocked for
some reason, which is a rather strange phenomenon. Reads/Writes to the
ramdisk still work fine). It happens rather seldom, though, and only on
specific boards/controllers.
Regards
-Klaus
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