From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262652AbUBNRGO (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Feb 2004 12:06:14 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262794AbUBNRGN (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Feb 2004 12:06:13 -0500 Received: from gizmo05ps.bigpond.com ([144.140.71.15]:6088 "HELO gizmo05ps.bigpond.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S262652AbUBNRGJ (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Feb 2004 12:06:09 -0500 From: Ross Dickson Reply-To: ross@datscreative.com.au Organization: Dat's Creative Pty Ltd To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: 2.4.24 Paging Fault, Cache tries to swap with no swap partition Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 03:06:35 +1000 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200402150306.35704.ross@datscreative.com.au> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Greetings, I have an imaging system writing files to removable hard drives. Compact Flash boot with ram drives so I usually have no swap partition or file. Recently I upgraded kernel from 2.4.20 to 2.4.24. System has "mem=460M" (512M ram fitted) and starts with about 400M free. After recording for a while the Cached ram acquires all but about 4Mb MemFree. On a hot 38C day it started Oops'ing re paging memory. It runs the same 2 programs all day gathering and compressing images. Sorry I have no detail on the Oops at the moment, computer is in a vehicle and does not normally have a screen. From memory it couldn't allocate a virtual page. I found if I put in a 16Mb ram drive as swap then it would grab roughly 1.4Mb of it on occasion and keep it until recording stopped for a while. SwapCached is either 0Kb or 1024Kb, not anything else. Is this behaviour expected - to require a swap file? Can the paging cache be tuned in /proc or somewhere to prevent it being so greedy as to want more memory than the machine has? Is the quickest fix to give it more ram. I read on another posting that with greater than 512Mb the cache won't grab any more? Regards Ross.