On Wednesday 02 November 2005 01:32, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 02:37:01AM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> > oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x400d2, order=0
>
> something explicitly asked for a highmem page.
>
> > 0 pages of HIGHMEM
>
> You don't have any.
>
> Calling the oom-killer in this situation seems drastic though.
>
> Dave
Except that the only difference between this test and the one that succeeds is
the value of "/proc/sys/vm/swappiness". With 60 it finishes, with 0 it
fails. The same binaries are being run by the same script, and in neither
case is there highmem in the kernel.
The test system is a User Mode Linux instance, running a shell script in place
of init. As a result, there are very few processes running in this system,
and only one is really active at a time.
At the failure point, the shell script calls the "make" of gcc 4.0.2, and far
and away the high point of memory usage is gcc's "genattrtab", which creates
and then compiles a .c file that causes the system to swap for about 5
minutes before it completes. (This is an extreme memory hog: Before I
started feeding UML a swap file, it couldn't complete with only 128 megs of
ram, but finished with 256. Now I'm telling UML mem=64M and attaching a 256
megabyte file to the Usermode Block Device driver, to act as a swap
partition.)
So at the point of failure, bash is blocked waiting on a child, make is
blocked waiting on a child, gcc is building its attrtab pig, and nothing else
(no daemons, not even init) is running on the system. It's a pretty
straightforward "the VM goes nuts in a low memory situation" case.
If you'd like to reproduce this, I can send you my build script. It's
self-contained, downloads all the source code it needs automatically, and
either succeeds or reproduces the problem quite deterministically depending
on whether or not the "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" line is present or
not.
Rob
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