Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 28 Dec 2000 00:24:20 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 28 Dec 2000 00:24:10 -0500 Received: from ns1.crl.go.jp ([133.243.3.1]:63453 "EHLO ns1.crl.go.jp") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 28 Dec 2000 00:24:00 -0500 Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2000 13:53:29 +0900 (JST) From: Tom Holroyd To: kernel mailing list Subject: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Linux 2.2.18, pcmcia-cs-3.1.21, Pentium 75 (100 MHz) Toshiba 420CDS Satellite Pro laptop, 40 MB RAM I can get this to happen reliably: kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for xntpd... kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for klogd... last message repeated 15 times kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for tail... last message repeated 15 times kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for init... last message repeated 15 times kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for vmstat... ... etc. It happens when swap gets full (I have 32 MB swap); I have a particular program that thrashes the system (balanced binary tree searching) so there's heavy swapping going on. Once, running 2.2.18pre23, this happened when I wasn't looking, and when I came back the system was dead -- I'm not sure what the message means or how long it could survive after that, but I run apmd/noflushd, and the disk & screen were powered down. I got the disk to spin back up, but nothing else happened. I just made do_try_to_free_pages fail again under 2.2.18, but I quit & rebooted before anything else happened. Can enough do_try_to_free_pages failures do that? Are they supposed to happen at all? Do I need to configure some out-of-memory thing? Dr. Tom Holroyd "I am, as I said, inspired by the biological phenomena in which chemical forces are used in repetitious fashion to produce all kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author)." -- Richard Feynman, _There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom_ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/