That was just a simple test case with dd. That test case might be invalid - but it is trying to trigger out of memory - doing this any other way still causes the problem. I note that playing with some bios settings I was actually able to trigger what appeared to be graphics corruption issues when I launched kde applications ... nothing shows up in dmesg so this might just be a conflict between xorg and the kernel with those bios settings... Anyway, This is no longer a 'problem' for me since I disabled overcommit and altered the values for dirty_ratio and dirty_background_ratio - and I cannot trigger it. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>