From: dvogt@novell.com (David Vogt) Subject: Re: Freeze up on X Date: 23 Jan 1993 00:21:54 GMT
In article <BALASUB.93Jan22093232@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu> balasub@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Krishna Balasubramanian) writes:
>
>This is unrelated to X-freez-ups on special vga hardware that
>some people have reported.
>
>Linux should behave even when pushed too hard. You should not push
>the system too hard but when you do the resulting behaviour is
>potentially useful for detecting bugs in the kernel.
>
I have had a number of problems with X freezing when pushed too hard.
I have 16M ram + 16M swap and have experienced lockups when swap approachs
0k. This is usually a result of running too many xloadimage's at once. I
have tried leaving the system to sort out it's problems but after about
an hour of no disk activity or screen movement I reset it. I've experimented
a bit and have noticed that I can get down to 20-30k swap free and things
still run fine (haven't tried to get closer to 0k than that) but once swap
is overcommitted, things tend to hang. I suspect that the last app started
in a low memory situation like this should fail due to out of mem or related
problem (malloc = NULL) but I have never seen an app die in this situation.
Another symptom that someone posted earlier is that swapping will eventually
stop and the screen won't update but moving the mouse (serial mouse) will
cause more disk activity for a short period of time and then everything locks
up solid.
-Dave Vogt
Generic Disclaimer : I speak only for myself