Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 13 Feb 1997 12:40:35 -0800 | From | (Joe Fouche) | Subject | Re: Behavior under swap catastrophe? |
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Dale R. Worley said: > In article <Mutt.19970212155407.jf@helix.caltech.edu> > jf@ugcs.caltech.edu (Joe Fouche) writes: > I've noticed lately that the behavior of the kernel when some > process goes berserk and fills up all the swap is a little > strange. It seems to start sending SEGV's to many processes as the > large one grows. This wouldn't be so bad, except that init is often > killed. Is a modification to protect the life of init in order? Or > should we just make sure this never happens? > > My suspicion is that it is not really the kernel sending SEGV's, but > rather that the programs are calling malloc, which discovers that it
I don't know how to distinguish between those two. When this happened a few months ago, I assumed it was the kernel because I saw kernel messages which read "not enough memory for *" when each process died. But I suppose this could just be saying that the kernel couldn't satisfy malloc. In any case I can't find that printk in the source tree (though I just did grep */*/*, not all that thorough)
> None of this explains why init dies. Perhaps init is not checking the > return value from malloc?
Last time this happened it didn't die outright, but said something like "giving up". After that it was still nonfunctional, though :) I'll look through the source if I get a chance. -- _ ____ Joe Fouche (jf@ugcs.caltech.edu) ___| |--- Deranged College Student [unhandled content-type:application/pgp-signature] |  |