kernel 2.4

["Ian Wright" <Ian-at-iw63.freeserve.co.uk>]

Hi Paul,

Just for your information, I got this message today from the Sheffield Linux
User Group. Perhaps it may be relevant to your playing with EMC.

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2. Serious Problems With Current 2.4 Kernels

9 May - 15 May (14 posts) Archive Link: 2.4.4 kernel freeze for unknown
reason

Jacky Liu kept experiencing what appeared to be random lockups every couple
days under 2.4.4; Vincent Stemen [*] confirmed:

"I have been experiencing these same problems since version 2.4.0.
Although, I I think it has improved a little in 2.4.4, it still locks up.
The problem seems to be related to memory management and/or swap, and is
seems to do it primarily on machines with over 128Mb of RAM. Although, I
have not tested systematically enough to confirm this.

"I have been monitoring the memory usage constantly with the gnome memory
usage meter and noticed that as swap grows it is never freed back up. I can
kill off most of the large applications, such as netscape, xemacs, etc, and
little or no memory and swap will be freed. Once swap is full after a few
days, my machine will lock up.

"If I turn swap off all together or turn it off and back on periodically to
clear the swap before it gets full, I do not seem to experience the lockups.

"I am running on an AMD K6-400 with 256 Mb RAM but we have experienced
these problems with various other machines as well."

Alan Cox [*] replied cryptically, "The swap handling in 2.4 is somewhat
hosed at the moment." He added, "I can give you a tiny patch that should
fix the lockups and instead it will kill processes out of memory but thats
obviously not the actual fix 8)" Later, he also said, "I switched my
desktop box back to 2.2 a while back until the VM works." Yikes!

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Ian
--
Ian W. Wright
Sheffield  UK
www.iw63.freeserve.co.uk