Messages in this thread | | | From | Chel van Gennip <> | Subject | Re: Badblocks and no free pages... | Date | Sun, 4 May 1997 16:17:38 +0100 (WETDST) |
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Sun, 4 May 1997 Doug Ledford wrote:> >> Can I report the following as bugs: >> - The fact that badblocks doesn't help prevent accidents is a bit unfortunate. >> - The fact that it generates "Couldn't get a free page" seems bad. >> In particular, why should this happen during writing? What needs to >> do an atomic page allocation? > >It's all because we are filling up all available RAM with write behind >buffers. Whenever it can't get a free page, it simply waits for some to >become available. Not a bug really, just shows us that the program is >writing as fast as it can. > >> - The unusable sluggishness of the machine is a bug. > >It was never intended to be something that you would run during normal >usage, it's a shake down, tear the drives and controllers apart type test >that should be run when you are aware of what these types of tests do to >machine performance and are prepared to wait for it to finish before >actually trying to do anything :)
I noticed something alike when doing "mke2fs" on a 9GB volume in 2.0.28. Is there a way to limit write behind buffers so more memory is available for other uses. Allocating more than eg. 2Mbyte per device won't speed things up I think. Programs like "badblocks" or "mke2fs" will use all available space for buffering.
Chel
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