Re: 2.4 and 2GB swap partition limit

Christoph Rohland
2001-05-01T13:49:55Z

Hi Alan,

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
>> paging in just released 2.4.4, but in previuos kernel, a page that
>> was paged-out, reserves its place in swap even if it is paged-in
>> again, so once you have paged-out all your ram at least once, you
>> can't get any more memory, even if swap is 'empty'.
>
> This is a bug in the 2.4 VM, nothing more or less. It and the
> horrible bounce buffer bugs are forcing large machines to remain on
> 2.2. So it has to get fixed

Yes, it is a bug. and thanks for stating this so clearly.

But a lot of the big servers can go to 2.4. because SYSV shm/shm
fs/tmpfs will reclaim the swap entries on swapin. So big databases and
applications servers which rely on shm are not affected.

Greetings
Christoph