debian 2.2 CRASHES often easily
I'm a Linux newbie, but I know this should not be happening. I can't get an uptime 36 hours -- Linux just freezes in X. Occassionally, I'm able to switch over to another VC, where I see VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for application ... (There are about 10 lines for each application I'm running). But for the most part, the entire system freezes I'm forced to do a *hard* reboot (and let fsck do its thing). After the reboot, /var/log/kern.log has a bunch of VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for application ... last message repeated x times (x varies from 2 to 31). From what I've read in the mail archives, I think editing /etc/security/limits.conf might fix my problems, but I really have no idea as to what values to use (and there's no manpage). Please help -- I would greatly appreciate it. P.S. Some info which might help: debian 2.2 (upgraded from 2.1) on an i686, Pentium II (400 MHz, not overclocked), 64 MB RAM, dmesg says: Memory: 63068k/65472k available (1072k kernel code, 416k reserved, 856k data, 60k init) hda: ST34321A, 4103MB w/128kB Cache, CHS=523/255/63, (U)DMA hdc: ATAPI 40X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache Adding Swap: 72288k swap-space (priority -1) Also, I've noticed that I always run out of swap before RAM, does this mean I should add more swap? If yes, how is this done? __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. http://shopping.yahoo.com/
debian 2.2 CRASHES often easily
Folken Lacour writes: I'm a Linux newbie, but I know this should not be happening. I can't get an uptime 36 hours -- Linux just freezes in X. Occassionally, I'm able to switch over to another VC, where I see VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for application ... I had exactly this problem when I had no swap partition. Adding Swap: 72288k swap-space (priority -1) Also, I've noticed that I always run out of swap before RAM, does this mean I should add more swap? If yes, how is this done? I think this is your problem. Adding 128 M of swap to 64 M of physical memory solved it for me. Unfortunately, unless you have some free space on your hard disk(s) you are going to have to delete a partition and recreate _it_ and a swap partition. You can use something like cfdisk. You might have used it when you installed Debian. Tom
Re: debian 2.2 CRASHES often easily
Folken Lacour [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for application ... Known problem in Linux 2.2.16 and also 2.2.17pre's. Upgrading to Linux 2.2.17 or even Linux 2.2.18pre should solve the problem. moritz -- Moritz Schulte [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hp9001.fh-bielefeld.de/~moritz/ Debian/GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org/ http://www.gnu.org GPG fingerprint = 3A14 3923 15BE FD57 FC06 B501 0841 2D7B 6F98 4199
Re: debian 2.2 CRASHES often easily
On Wed, Nov 22, 2000 at 07:22:06PM +, Tom Huckstep wrote: I think this is your problem. Adding 128 M of swap to 64 M of physical memory solved it for me. Unfortunately, unless you have some free space on your hard disk(s) you are going to have to delete a partition and recreate _it_ and a swap partition. You can use something like cfdisk. You might have used it when you installed Debian. Not true. You can turn a regular file into a swap file and add it to /etc/fstab (see man mkswap). I have one in /var/local set with a lower priority than the dedicated partition. -- Eric G. Miller egm2@jps.net
Re: debian 2.2 CRASHES often easily
Hi Folken, The do_try_to_free_pages failures are symptoms of a bug in the 2.2.17pre6 kernel that ships with 2.2. I have a K6/2 233 machine with 64M RAM which displays these errors occasionally. They don't appear to be fatal but could be leaking memory? I also have a 486SLC 33 machine with 8M RAM which displays these errors a lot during installation and package upgrades. Again they're not fatal. Your problems could be related to this bug and running out of swap space. Neither of my machines have done this, the first has 512M of swap and runs X and StarOffice. The second doesn't run X - with 8M of RAM it doesn't run anything big :) You can configure additional swap space using a file. You will need to use dd to create the file and mkswap then swapon to create and activate the swap area. I suggest reading the manpages for these. The alternative is to install a more stable kernel e.g. 2.2.17 final. I haven't done this myself yet. Regards, Neil Darlow. -- 1024D/531F9048 1999-09-11 Neil Darlow [EMAIL PROTECTED] Key fingerprint = 359D B8FF 6273 6C32 BEAA 43F9 E579 E24A 531F 9048 On 11/22/00, 6:21:00 PM, Folken Lacour wrote: I'm a Linux newbie, but I know this should not be happening. I can't get an uptime 36 hours -- Linux just freezes in X. Occassionally, I'm able to switch over to another VC, where I see VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for application ... (There are about 10 lines for each application I'm running). But for the most part, the entire system freezes I'm forced to do a *hard* reboot (and let fsck do its thing). After the reboot, /var/log/kern.log has a bunch of VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for application ... last message repeated x times (x varies from 2 to 31).
