Subject: Re: lock-up during memory shortage
To: Steven M. Bellovin <>
From: James Chacon <>
List: current-users
Date: 05/14/2003 11:57:35
I've generally found this to be repeatable if you run the machine completely
out of memory and swap. Something deadlocks and the machine otherwise goes
catatonic on me. This is especially true if the memory shortfall hits something
on the kernel side (I had the vnodes cache too large once and pulling enough
files into cache would lock it solid everytime kernel mem approached phys mem).


>In message <>, Andreas Wrede 
>>I am running 1.6.1 on a /i386 machine with 128Mb memory. I get regular
>>lock-ups during times of high-memory, high-swap activity, typically
>>during a nightly rsync run against a large filesystem on a remote
>>machine.  I can still break into the debugger, but all higher level
>>function are frozen. (I don't even get character echo on the serial
>>console). The tracebacks for the last two lock-ups are:
>I've seen lockups that I attribute to similar causes.  I haven't been 
>able to get into the debugger, but I'm almost always in X.
>		--Steve Bellovin, (me)
> (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)