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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday, 2009-01-06 at 11:16 -0000, Rui Santos wrote:
I've stumbled on a problem, on a test machine, using openSUSE 11.1 x86_64 system with 512MB of RAM. This test was just to confirm a friends claim that he was unable to get a working server with that kind of hardware.
The problem is that openSUSE uses all of the memory for simple tasks, like fsck. Just as an example, here is an strace of a fsck.vfat on a filesystem. For this I just left the system with 90MB free memory before I ran this command:
2090 execve("/sbin/fsck.vfat", ["fsck.vfat", "/dev/sdb1"], [/* 20 vars */]) = 0
...
2090 lseek(3, 39069696, SEEK_SET) = 39069696 2090 read(3, <unfinished ...> 2090 +++ killed by SIGKILL +++
:-)
The latest SIGKILL was generated by ooom-kill. Linux kernel kills the process in order to get memory. There were no programs running, as this command was issued under init 1 The system has no SWAP
It is known. If you check up the fsck script run at boot, you will see that it activates swap before running the fsck. You need swap with so "little" memory. Linux is memory hungry, and some programs even more so. Look, /etc/init.d/boot.rootfsck: start) # # fsck may need a huge amount of memory, so make sure, it is there. # echo "Activating swap-devices in /etc/fstab..." swapon -ae &> /dev/null rc_status -v1 -r See the comment? And with 64bits, it is worse. Just consider, that a program assigns a long int... if it was 32 bits, now it is double that, 64 bits. If the programmers are not carefull, compiling for 64 bits might end with using double memory }:-) - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkljTLAACgkQtTMYHG2NR9WvmQCfZvI8w4LT4BgRSbG74Ea09c25 N+wAoItgsRFh+07qmeYXY6MKRrQ3Dkf0 =6ShC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org