Messages in this thread |  | | From | Vincent Stemen <> | Date | Fri, 11 May 2001 13:45:24 -0500 | Subject | Re: 2.4.4 kernel freeze for unknown reason |
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On Wednesday 09 May 2001 22:57, Jacky Liu wrote: > Dear All, > > I would like to post a question regarding to a problem of unknown freeze of > my linux firewall/gateway. > > Here is the hardware configuration of my machine: > > AMD K-6 233 MHz > 2theMax P-55 VP3 mobo > 64Mb RAM in a single module (PC-100) > Maxtor 6G UDMA-33 harddisk > Matrox MG-II display card w/8Mb RAM > 3Com 3C905B-TX NIC > RealTek 8129 10/100 NIC > > It's running 2.4.4 kernel (RedHat 7.1) and acting as a firewall using > Netfilter (gShield and Snort), DNS (Cache-Only DNS) and NAT gateway > (ip-masq.) for my home network. I used 3C905B-TX NIC as my internal NIC and > RealTek 8129 as my external NIC. Here is the problem: > > The machine has been randomly lockup (totally freeze) for number of times > without any traceable clue or error message. Usually the time frame between > each lockup is between 24 to 72 hours. The screen just freeze when it's > lockup (either in Console or X) and no "kernel panic" type or any error > message prompt up. All services (SSH, DNS, etc..) are dead when it's lockup > and I cannot find any useful information in /var/log/messages. I cannot > reproduce the lockup since it's totally randomly. The lockup happened > either when I was playing online game (A LOT, like getting thousands of > server status in counter-strike in a very short time frame, of NAT > traffic), surfing the web (normal traffic) or the machine was totally in > idle (lockup when I was sleeping). It was lockup this morning when I was > playing online game (when my game machine was trying to establish > connection to a game server). > > If there is any information you would like to obtain, please let me know. I > would like to receive a copy of your reply, thank you very much for your > kindly attention. >
I have been experiencing these same problems since version 2.4.0. Although, I think it has improved a little in 2.4.4, it still locks up. The problem seems to be related to memory management and/or swap, and is seems to do it primarily on machines with over 128Mb of RAM. Although, I have not tested systematically enough to confirm this.
I have been monitoring the memory usage constantly with the gnome memory usage meter and noticed that as swap grows it is never freed back up. I can kill off most of the large applications, such as netscape, xemacs, etc, and little or no memory and swap will be freed. Once swap is full after a few days, my machine will lock up.
If I turn swap off all together or turn it off and back on periodically to clear the swap before it gets full, I do not seem to experience the lockups.
I am running on an AMD K6-400 with 256 Mb RAM but we have experienced these problems with various other machines as well.
I hope this information is helpfull in tracking down the problem.
The features of the 2.4.x kernels are great and I believe all the kernel developers have done a fantastic job! However, I am disappointed that we are now on the forth 2.4.x kernel version and such as serious problem that has been there since 2.4.0 still exists. This is pretty much a show stopper for having a production machine. In the past when I was running on 2.0.3x kernels, I boasted to everybody about how rock solid Linux was and I was able to run for 5 months without a single reboot or problem, but for the last year or more I have not had much better uptime than certain other commercial operating systems. As important as the new features are, stability should be top priority for production systems. I apologize if this sounds a bit like a rant but I feel that ever since the 2.2.x kernel series, the Linux kernel community has veered away from it's original philosophy of only releasing stable kernels with even numbered versions. In fact, I have seen several even numbered kernels released with far less stability than most of the odd numbered development kernels.
- Vincent
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