Hi, On my IBM X31 laptop, the system entirely locks up when there's a lot of disk access, some common situations are: - when getting heavily into swap due to a runaway process - when running rpm/yum It's not *technically* locked up (i.e. if you wait long enough it will come back) but in practice you have to reboot if a process has a memory leak, and you can't do any work while running yum. I have 512M of physical memory. I tried reducing swap from 1G to 256M so runaway processes wouldn't require a reboot, but I just now had a runaway process and discovered that less swap helps a little bit (you can at least move the mouse pointer) but I still had to reboot because it was taking multiple minutes to get a window open to run "killall" and the root login times out before the Password: prompt comes up. Some people with real hard drives instead of slow-ass laptop drives say this doesn't happen to them. Is there any solution (that we can enable by default/automatically, not much of a solution otherwise)? Right now it's sort of like running an OS without protected memory. A bad solution (since most people won't know about it) might be a hotkey that says "massively lower the priority of any process that's doing a lot of disk access at the moment" or something. Or just a "kill any process using more memory than I have physical memory," I don't know. Maybe a cap on process size, so there can be 1G virtual memory but an individual app can only use 512M? Maybe when a process reaches 512M we could suspend it and ask the user whether to let it grow further? With a kernel event when processes pass a certain size you could even do that heuristically (with races) by implementing the "kill -STOP" in userspace in response to an event. Would it help to mlock() the X server, window manager, and panel ;-) Or is it just VM tuning that's needed? If there's no automatic way to make this work, maybe there's at least a way to key off a single global desktop vs. server flag rather than requiring more detailed tuning? Havoc
