Re: 2.4.20 instability on bigmem systems?

["Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade" <gregory@castandcrew.com>]

On Sunday 16 March 2003 18:26, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> If it didn't behave badly then it won't help to look at the stats.

I'm seriously at my wits end.  (Not because of you!  I hate vague 
problems...)  I have no idea why it behaved itself this time, just like i 
have no idea why it misbehaves.

Right now, I'm back to running 2.4.19 with the inode.c patch from one of the 
2.4.19-preXX-aaY kernels (see 
http://castandcrew.com/~gregory/lkmlstuff/burpr/2.4.19/patches) as the most 
stable thing we've gotten so far.

I'm going to write some scripts to run out of cron ever 5 minutes (or maybe 
even every minute) to collect meminfo, slabinfo, ps output, and whatever 
else i can think of.  What else would be useful to help you track down 
these problems?

Hopefully, the next time the system goes to hell, I'll have _something_ to 
give you.

As a side question, is bigmem >2GB?  I.e., if I pass "mem=2048m" to the 
kernel from lilo, will the bigmem stuff for the VM be disabled, or should I 
instead build a new kernel with high memory support turned off?  Also, with 
highmem support turned off, the max memory is 2GB, right?  I may well just 
ignore the high 6GB out of desperation to get a stable system until 2.6 is 
released.

Thanks again for taking the time.

Working on a migrain,
Gregory

-- 
Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <gregory@castandcrew.com>
Sr. Systems Administrator
Cast & Crew Entertainment Services, Inc.