Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 17:17:38 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 17:17:17 -0500 Received: from erasmus.jurri.net ([62.236.96.196]:18917 "EHLO oberon.erasmus.jurri.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 17:17:06 -0500 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: 2.4.16: Out of memory - when still more than 100MB free From: Samuli Suonpaa Date: 17 Dec 2001 23:44:28 +0200 Message-ID: <87elltwmgz.fsf@puck.erasmus.jurri.net> Lines: 41 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.4 (Artificial Intelligence) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I've got VMWare killed a couple of times mysteriously. I've got 256MB memory and no swap on my laptop running 2.4.16 and for some reason VMWare has got killed with the following syslog information: Dec 17 23:33:23 puck kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 28803 (vmware). Dec 17 23:33:35 puck kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 28804 (vmware). Dec 17 23:33:37 puck kernel: /dev/vmmon: Vmx86_ReleaseVM: unlocked pages: 75286, unlocked dirty pages: 51084 What I find odd is, that I am quite certain this machine did _not_ run out of memory when this happened. Just a few minutes ago I had an idle VMWare session and started an XEmacs to edit a large file. Just being curious, I happened to say 'free' a few seconds before VMWare got killed: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 256224 219748 36476 0 12956 48816 -/+ buffers/cache: 157976 98248 Swap: 0 0 0 Boom, it died about the same time I exit from XEmacs. After that, I ran 'free' again: n$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 256224 203644 52580 0 13148 81620 -/+ buffers/cache: 108876 147348 Swap: 0 0 0 I may be missing something obvious herfe, but I just can't figure out why kernel killes VMWare in this situation. If anyone's interested, I think I can reproduce this and - if someone will kindly instruct me a bit - produce some more information. I _think_ this is the place where experienced kernel hackers start speaking about running 'vmstat'. And where I usually start having problems undertanding what it is that people are talking about... Suonp??... - 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/