Re: OOM-killer going crazy.

Nick Piggin
2004-07-27T13:30:56Z

Ed Sweetman wrote:

> I tried it, i dont slow down or crash when burning the cd the first
> time. It's a small cd that doesn't take up my entire ram size, but the
> memory is still not freed. If i tried it again i would be rebooting
> right now. I only have 70MB out of 650MB free after burning the cd.
> Cache only takes up 122MB, and buf takes up 1MB. and i'm using 100MB of
> swap. I will run vmstat when i do it when i get home later today.
> It's not so much that the kernel is leaking memory, I think it thinks
> it's handling a pointer to data it's supposed to write to disk, but it's
> writing the wrong data, either a slightly misaligned offset or mangled
> pointer because the audio cd did write but the audio it wrote is
> unintelligable. It almost sort of sounds like it should but it's
> completely fubared. And i've done this with swab on and off before
> thinking the drive automatically wrote audio with SWAB on and cdrecord's
> swab was countering it or something but that was not the case. The
> audio source files were ripped from a cd using the same drive and they
> sound good on the harddrive. The drive seems to have no real problem
> ripping audio. Just writing it. Normal cds show no problem as i've
> previously mentioned.
> If this is a vfs problem then i'd like to know what audio writing has to
> do with filesystems since it's raw data. Even ignoring the mem leak
> problem that appears to manifest in different ways on different
> computers, this OOM situation only happens to me when burning audio cds,
> not data.
>

OK so it does sound like a different problem.

I didn't follow your other thread closely... does /proc/slabinfo
show any evidence of a leak?