From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 22 May 2002 10:37:07 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 22 May 2002 10:37:06 -0400 Received: from holomorphy.com ([66.224.33.161]:62098 "EHLO holomorphy") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 22 May 2002 10:37:04 -0400 Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 07:36:51 -0700 From: William Lee Irwin III To: "M. Edward Borasky" Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com, andrea@suse.de, riel@surriel.com, torvalds@transmeta.com, akpm@zip.com.au Subject: Re: Have the 2.4 kernel memory management problems on large machines been fixed? Message-ID: <20020522143651.GA14918@holomorphy.com> Mail-Followup-To: William Lee Irwin III , "M. Edward Borasky" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com, andrea@suse.de, riel@surriel.com, torvalds@transmeta.com, akpm@zip.com.au In-Reply-To: <20020522085111.C20554@ds217-115-141-141.dedicated.hosteurope.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Description: brief message Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.25i Organization: The Domain of Holomorphy Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 07:00:11AM -0700, M. Edward Borasky wrote: > A few months ago, there was a flurry of reports from people having > difficulties with memory management on large machines (ia32 over 4 GB). I've > seen a lot of 2.4.x-yy kernels go by and much VM discussion, but what I'm > *not* seeing is reports of either catastrophic behavior or its absence on > large machines. I haven't had a chance to run my own test cases on the > 2.4.18 kernel from Red Hat 7.3 yet, so I can't make any personal > contribution to this discussion. The catastrophic failures are still happening, in fact, the last lse-tech conference call a week or two ago was dedicated at least in part to them. The number of different ways in which these failures occur is large, so it's taking a while for the iterations of whack-a-mole game to converge to kernel stability. Andrea has probably been doing the most visible stuff on this front with the recent bh/inode exhaustion patches, with due credit to akpm as well for the unconditional bh stripping patch. Cheers, Bill