Hi Finn,
On Tue, 7 Apr 2015, Michael Schmitz wrote:
The gunzip error cannot be reproduced on any of my ARAnyM VMs. Might be
a RAM error or other hardware related problem. Same kernel but
configured slightly different (added 030 and 040 support, plus ARAnyM
support).
The configuration differences could be cancelled by booting your new
aranym kernel on the physical hardware, and reproducing the fault that
Sure, and I'll make certain to do that once I've finished the current
task (updating stuff in a current unstable chroot).
way. BTW, is this the same physical machine that has DMA issues, which we
discussed off-list in the past?
The very same. Runs fairly stable otherwise though - I would have
expected filesystem corruption or other more drastic errors if the RAM
was faulty.
The general behaviour (gunzip eats up all free RAM, then kswapd spins
doing nothing very apparent, with no dirty pages to be flushed and
cached pages never released) remains the same. Though I've seen the
gunzip complete without kicking off kswapd on occasion (had set
dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio half the default for that).
And yes, dropping cached pages as Andreas suggested, does free up
significant (i.e. most of all) RAM and shuts up kswapd.
This bug has been reported to Red Hat in the past (on x86_64). They closed
the bugzilla entry in 2011, but the bug was still being reported by Fedora
users in 2014. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=712019
Thanks for pointing that out!
The patches attached to this report made it into Linus' git tree at that
time so I presume we are seeing something closely related. The
discussion on LRML makes my head spin - not a chance to debug this in a
meaningful way, I suppose.
Michael
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-m68k" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
