PROBLEM: oom-killer bringing machine down in 2.6.10

[Jeff Blaine <jblaine@mitre.org>]

I posted this to the NFS list and was told to post
here.

I have a box with 4GB.  It's running Red Hat Fedora Core
3 with 2.6.10 as distributed by them.  No custom kernel
compiling, and no desire :)

The problem reported below DID NOT happen with 2.4.21.
It did happen also with 2.6.9, and I cannot comment on
other kernels.  So, it happens with 2.6.9 and 2.6.10,
but not 2.4.21, and anything else has not been tried.

I am trying to run Iozone with -g and an argument to it
that is larger than the physical memory in the NFSv3
client machine.

For instance, on this 4GB box, I am trying '-g 4224m'.
More specifically, the entire command line is:

      ./iozone -a -g 4224m -f /sol9box/testfile

As soon as it finally gets to trying a file size of
4194304, oom-killer steps in and starts blasting
processes off my machine.  NFS stops functioning,
RPC calls to the box fail, SSH connections are no
longer accepted, and I generally have to hard
powercycle the box.

Reference: http://www.iozone.org/