Re: Have the 2.4 kernel memory management problems on large machines been fixed?

William Lee Irwin III
2002-05-22T14:37:07Z

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