Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps

Mike A. Harris
2001-06-07T00:35:19Z

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Derek Glidden wrote:

>> Derek> overwhelmed. On the system I'm using to write this, with
>> Derek> 512MB of RAM and 512MB of swap, I run two copies of this
>>
>> Please see the following message on the kernel mailing list,
>>
>> 3086:Linus 2.4.0 notes are quite clear that you need at least twice RAM of swap
>> Message-Id: <E155bG5-0008AX-00@the-village.bc.nu>
>
>Yes, I'm aware of this.
>
>However, I still believe that my original problem report is a BUG. No
>matter how much swap I have, or don't have, and how much is or isn't
>being used, running "swapoff" and forcing the VM subsystem to reclaim
>unused swap should NOT cause my machine to feign death for several
>minutes.
>
>I can easily take 256MB out of this machine, and then I *will* have
>twice as much swap as RAM and I can still cause the exact same
>behaviour.
>
>It's a bug, and no number of times saying "You need twice as much swap
>as RAM" will change that fact.

Precicely. Saying 8x RAM doesn't change it either. Sometime
next week I'm going to purposefully put a new 60Gb disk in on a
separate controller as pure swap on top of 256Mb of RAM. My
guess is after bootup, and login, I'll have 48Gb of stuff in
swap "just in case".

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Mike A. Harris - Linux advocate - Open Source advocate
Opinions and viewpoints expressed are solely my own.
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