Re: Small System Paging Problem - OOM-killer goes nuts

["Josh Goldsmith" <joshin@hotmail.com>]

Thanks for the response Mikael.

Is your 486 running a IDE disk on a normal interface or via USB?  I wonder 
if the NSLU2 only having I/O via USB might be significant.  Also, this is a 
2.6 kernel and I've seen spurious reports across the internet about similar 
oom-killer problems since about 2.6.7.

Thanks!
   -Josh

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mikael Pettersson" <mikpe@it.uu.se>
To: <joshin@hotmail.com>; <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2007 3:55 PM
Subject: Re: Small System Paging Problem - OOM-killer goes nuts


> I'm no VM tuning expert, but I have and still do heavy compile
> jobs on similarly configured machines, with no OOM problems:
>
> I regularly build 2.6 kernels and occasionally also gcc on a
> 100MHz 486 with 28MB of RAM and perhaps 500MB of swap. It runs
> a standard but stripped down Fedora Core 4 user-space, with ext3
> file systems and a kernel that doesn't include anything non-essential.
> The machine will swap madly, but the OOM killer never triggers.
> (All system settings are FC4 defaults. I haven't touched them.)
>
> In the past I did a fair amount of package rebuilds and test suite
> runs on an NSLU2 myself, with a 2.4 Linksys/Openslug kernel, ext3,
> and a 1GB or perhaps 2GB swap partition on a disk attached via a
> USB2-to-PATA enclosure. Even when swapping heavily the OOM killer
> wouldn't trigger.
>