Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 18 Jun 2002 19:17:00 +0100 (BST) | From | Hugh Dickins <> | Subject | Re: VMM - freeing up swap space |
| |
On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Richard B. Johnson wrote: > On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, DevilKin wrote: > > On Tuesday 18 June 2002 17:10, Richard B. Johnson wrote: > > > > > > Sure. Execute `swapoff -a`, followed by `swapon -a`. This is no joke. > > > > Hmm. Now if you happen to get out of memory during the swapoff part, you'll > > get the OO killer on your tail? Or will the system just go freeze solid? > > I think `swapoff -a` will just fail to remove the swap device/file(s) if > it doesn't have the memory. I've done this with 16 Mb of RAM in the > 'good-old-days', where VM was swap.
You're right that swapoff should just fail, but sadly we've not done the work to make that so: the OOM-killer does indeed come in (and it's not the swapoff task it attacks); and if that can't free enough, then the system will freeze.
In what forum, by the way, may I suggest to distros that they "rm -rf" in any tmpfs mounts before shutdown swapoff? It avoids this OOM issue at shutdown, plus it's a whole lot faster than doing the swapoff.
Hugh
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |