2.6.24.3-12.fc8 memory issue?

[Peter McNeil]

Peter McNeil wrote:
> Frank Cox wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:55:06 +1100
>> Peter McNeil <peter at mcneils.net> wrote:
>>
>>  
>>> G'day all,
>>>
>>> did a yum update this morning which updated the kernel to  
>>> 2.6.24.3-12.fc8 then started my IDE and a largish program (java), as 
>>> soon as I hit the physical memory limit (2GB) the machine hangs 
>>> (freezes) sometimes the mouse freezes too. I have to power down to 
>>> recover.
>>>
>>> ...]$ uname -a
>>> Linux foo-foo.mcneils.net 2.6.24.3-12.fc8 #1 SMP Tue Feb 26 14:21:30 
>>> EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
>>>
>>> is this a known problem?
>>>     
>>
>> Do you have any swap file(s)?
>>
>> What is the output of "free" (without the quotes).
>>   
> Very hard to tell, the machine literally freezes. I'm watching the 
> System Monitor while I load the apps and memory goes to 100% swap 
> doesn't seem to rise at all.
>
> Right, just sshed into the machine and ran top while I filled the 
> memory with java apps and it froze at this point:-
>
> top - 14:13:36 up 29 min,  4 users,  load average: 1.32, 0.56, 0.38
> Tasks: 162 total,   1 running, 161 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 18.2%us,  6.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 43.0%id, 32.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  
> 0.7%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:   2061304k total,  2042936k used,    18368k free,    44764k buffers
> Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   679356k cached
>
> So swap isn't being used and the memory (inc cache) is filled at the 
> point it freezes.
>
Confirmed using "stress -vm x" that filling up the memory causes the freeze.