[[email protected]: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed in 2.2.17]

Hi all,

Yet another 2.2.17-eats-my-VM report. Does anyone have proven patches other than reverting completely to the old 2.2 VM? There's been lots of discussion and hypothesising but no silver bullets so far.

--Stephen

----- Forwarded message from Michael L Torrie <[email protected]> -----

Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 23:11:51 -0600 (MDT)
From: Michael L Torrie <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed in 2.2.17

If you're not the right man to talk to, couldyou forward this onto the kernel mailing list? Your name was on the source code, so I guess you are the person who wrote it, unless I have the wrong Steve Tweedie. Forgive me for not writing to the mailing list, but the traffic level prohibits my subscribing.

In any case, On three separate occasions, on 2 different machines, I've had the kernel report:

Sep 16 22:19:35 enterprise kernel: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for

sawfish..

and for many different programs. Basically the kernel just spins out of control and the whole machine locks up. I understand this was a bug in the 2.2.16 series, but thought it had been fixes in the 2.2.17 series. I need to report the bug is alive and well. Programs that I know don't have memory leaks (they've run fro months in the past) suddenly appear to be consuming huge amounts of ram and swap until the machine thrashes to a halt. Perhaps the VM code cannot or does not release pages correctly. It appears that programs that do a lot of dynamic allocation will suffer. XMMS brought down the system in 15 minutes one time.

I've also had this happen on a server running the same processor with Reiserfs. I had to cold restart it. From watching the system (It has 2 GB of ram and 2 GB of swap so it takes a few days to get to that point), every once in a while, the kswapd will do some sort of massive swap, which interrupts nfs service, and in fact all operation. Is that normal?

If I need to be clearer or provide more information, please let me know. I'd appreciate if this problem would receive attention, as I want my machine to stay up for more than several days, and I don't want to have to reboot my server, ever.

thank you very much.

Michael Torrie
BYU CS System Programmer
----

----- End forwarded message -----
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Have you read Andrea VM-global patch against 2.2.18pre ?

I have received 3 or 4 reports of success with them.

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