Re: Machine livelock with latest (4.99.48) kernel on sparc64 -- mem leak?

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 03:46:30PM -0500, Rafal Boni wrote:
> 
> vmstat seems to confirm this is due to some memory-related condition... 
> stats below are samples every 2 seconds (I'm impatient ;)).  This has 
> happened every time I've started off a more significant build on this 
> box running 4.99.48 -- be it just a kernel build or an attempt to build 
> the whole system.
> 
> Here's idle vmstat shortly after the machine booted:
> procs    memory      page                       disks   faults      cpu
> r b w    avm    fre  flt  re  pi   po   fr   sr m0 c0   in   sy  cs us sy id
> 0 0 0  17904 450064  595   0   0    0    0    0  0  0  152  503 123  1 5 94
...
> Build kicked off:
> 0 0 0  24680 439448 2423   0   0    0    0    0  0  0  153  918 222  2 13 85
..
> Now systems starts to get less and less usable (memory dropping, CPU 
> mostly idle, disk is making lots of noise; where did all my processes go?):
...
> 4 0 0  36960  20360 8355   0   0    0    0    0  0  0  169 5331 375 51 48  0
...
> 0 0 0  20320    360  604 242 183  120  295 1172  0  0  763   73 1136 2  7 91
...
> Here's final fun spike of frentic VM activity before I decided to kill 
> the system due to lack of response:
...
> 0 0 0  18800    264 6396 2067 2173 701 3327 18417 0  0 8465   85 13536 0 

Free memory going down is usual - just the space being used to cache file.
However in his case it might be locked-down (ie kernel) memory that is
running out (and/or leaking).

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost