seems like ramfs lets the system hang when swapping is involved.
I have a ramfs mounted as /tmp. When I create a large file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/xxx bs=1024K count=200
(with 128M RAM), the complete system comes to a halt. Hitting keys does not do
anything anymore, console switching still works, but all other processes come
to a halt as well. SysRq still works and by doing a 'saK', I can kill the dd
process - afterwards, everything is fine again.
Same thing anytime I write large amounts of data to the ramfs.
Now today I even had that problem without writing anything to /tmp: running a
compilation that creates one process sized ~100M, suddenly everything froze the
same way as described above. Later a unmounted the ramfs and everything worked
fine.
B.t.w.: Apart from this bug, ramfs really is a great thing. Mounting it to /tmp
speeds up a number of tasks significantly! (p.e. browsing into archives with
mc, which uses temporary files heavily.) IMO, that method should be propagated
much more!
Ciao,
Nobbi
-- -- ______________________________________________________ -- JESUS CHRIST IS LORD! -- To Him, even that machine here has to obey...-- -- _________________________________Norbert "Nobbi" Nemec -- Hindenburgstr. 44 ... D-91054 Erlangen ... Germany -- eMail: <nobbi@cheerful.com> Tel: +49-(0)-9131-204180 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/