linux swap freeze STILL in 2.4.x

Marc Lehmann (pcg@goof.com)
Sun, 25 Feb 2001 15:59:29 +0100


It seems linux-2.4 still freezes on out-of-memory situations:

I was using 2.4.2-ac3 SMP and had a fairly large background job that takes
hundreds of megabytes of memory, much more than I have:

Mem: 255296 81836 173460 0 10324 30608
Swap: 99992 0 99992

Usually I swapon ./swap some 512MB swapfile, but today I forgot it. When the
machine started to get sluggish I sent the process a -STOP signal.

Swap: 99992 99992 0

O.k, (I had about 12MB of main memory free (in the +/- buffers line of
free) and the machine was sluggish but workable for about five minutes. At
the instant I did a swapon ./swap the machine froze hard (no sysrq, no
ping etc...)

I thought these complete freezes on OOM-situations had been fixed in
2.4.x? Do I have to watch out for andrea's fix-2.4-oom patches?

;)

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