Carlos E. R. wrote:
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 }:-)
So... you're saying that the problem may be that some programs may be more memory hungry than others, witch can have worst results on a 64 bits OS. So this mau be a general Linux issue, and not openSUSE specific. Man, It never crossed my mind I would need 512MB of RAM to perform a file system check on a 850MB worth of files on a 100GB vfat file system. Gee, this is really, really scary... Thanks for your reply Carlos,
-- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
-- Rui Santos http://www.ruisantos.com/ Veni, vidi, Linux! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org