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SubjectDisk cache/DMA buffer problems
Hi all,
This is a bug which has bothered me for many months, and finally
annoyed me enough to report it. The kernel likes chewing up copious
amounts of RAM for my disk cache/buffers, and can sometimes chew up in
excess of 40mb of physical RAM in doing so. However, sometimes when I try
and use the sound device, there isn't enough RAM free to allocate a DMA
buffer. I can fix this problem by simply malloc'ing some space (say 5mb),
then freeing it, as this kicks the disk buffers out and gives me back some
RAM. Is there any way that I can quota the kernel on how much RAM it's
allowed to use for disk cache/buffer?

Also, another very interesting problem. I ran out of RAM a few weeks ago,
so I added another swapfile. However, when I removed this swapfile, I had
problems with programs running out of RAM. 'free' shows there to be 100mb
of swap free, and 35mb physical RAM free, however, Shift-PrintScreen shows
there to be 35mb physical and -148k of swap free. (Yes, negative 148k).
Is this a known problem to anyone else? I'm running 2.0.34 on i586, 64mb
physical RAM, 127mb swapfile.

Davey


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