Hi,

seems like ramfs lets the system hang when swapping is involved.

I have a ramfs mounted as /tmp. When I create a large file:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/xxx bs=1024K count=200
    
(with 128M RAM), the complete system comes to a halt. Hitting keys does not do 
anything anymore, console switching still works, but all other processes come 
to a halt as well. SysRq still works and by doing a 'saK', I can kill the dd 
process - afterwards, everything is fine again.

Same thing anytime I write large amounts of data to the ramfs.

Now today I even had that problem without writing anything to /tmp: running a 
compilation that creates one process sized ~100M, suddenly everything froze the 
same way as described above. Later a unmounted the ramfs and everything worked 
fine.

B.t.w.: Apart from this bug, ramfs really is a great thing. Mounting it to /tmp 
speeds up a number of tasks significantly! (p.e. browsing into archives with 
mc, which uses temporary files heavily.) IMO, that method should be propagated 
much more!

Ciao,
Nobbi

-- 
-- ______________________________________________________
-- JESUS CHRIST IS LORD!
--          To Him, even that machine here has to obey...
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-- _________________________________Norbert "Nobbi" Nemec
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-- eMail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   Tel: +49-(0)-9131-204180
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