Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 16 Jul 2001 11:39:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 16 Jul 2001 11:39:40 -0400 Received: from delta.Colorado.EDU ([128.138.139.9]:45330 "EHLO ibg.colorado.edu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 16 Jul 2001 11:39:24 -0400 Message-Id: <200107161539.JAA183448@ibg.colorado.edu> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Too much memory causes crash when reading/writing to disk Organization: Institute for Behavioral Genetics University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0447 X-Phone: +1 303 492 2843 X-FAX: +1 303 492 0852 X-URL: http://ibgwww.Colorado.EDU/~lessem/ X-Copyright: All original content is copyright 2001 Jeff Lessem. X-Copyright: Quoted and non-original content may be copyright the X-Copyright: original author or others. Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 09:39:28 -0600 From: Jeff Lessem Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I have done a bit more work on the problem I reported in my message "Crashes reading and writing to disk". To recap, on a machine with 8GB of RAM, either dd if=/dev/zero bs=1G count=10 | split -b 1073741824 or find /bigfulldisk -type f -exec cat {} \; > /dev/null can reliably cause a crash. In my naive view, it seems like once a certain amount of memory is being completely used for disk buffer (cache, whatever, excuse my not knowing the proper term) the kernel gets very confused and dies. The dd dies after having written about 4.5GB. Booting the machine with mem=3000M avoids the crashes. I haven't done a binary search to determine what the maximum amount of memory I can use is before the problem exhibits itself. Hopefully this provides a hint as to what could be causing the problem. If any more information would be useful, please ask. To go along with this, are there any parameters in /proc/sys/vm/* that I could tune to avoid these crashes? -- Thanks, Jeff Lessem. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/