VM breakdown, 2.4.0 family

Since the testN series and up through ac12, I experience total loss of control when memory is nearly exhausted.

I start with 256M and eat it up with programs until there is only about 7 megs left, no swap. From that point all user processes stall and the disk begins to grind nonstop. It will continue to grind for about 25-30 minutes until it goes completely silent. No processes get killed, no VM messages are emitted.

The only recourse is the magic key. If I reboot before the disk goes silent I can cleanly kill X with sysrq-E and restart.

If I wait until it goes silent, all is lost. I have to sysrq-SUB.

Note, I do not have ANY swap enabled for these tests.

SysRq: Show Memory
Mem-info:
Free pages: 22124kB ( 0kB HighMem)
( Active: 3427, inactive_dirty: 521, inactive_clean: 0, free: 5531 (383 766 1149) )
282*4kB 55*8kB 5*16kB 0*32kB 0*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 1*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB = 2160kB)
1769*4kB 795*8kB 156*16kB 56*32kB 21*64kB 1*128kB 1*256kB 1*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB = 19964kB)
= 0kB)
Swap cache: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0
Free swap: 0kB
65532 pages of RAM
0 pages of HIGHMEM
2113 reserved pages
3981 pages shared
0 pages swap cached
0 pages in page table cache
Buffer memory: 2780kB

Note the "= 0kB)" line in the middle? Is printk() data missing? how about the mismatched ( to )?

-d

--
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Could you try this patch and tell the result?

http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~marcelo/patches/v2.4/2.4.1pre10/bg_page_aging.patch

Thanks

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