On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 05:34:23PM +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote: > do you mean what vm_page reports at the earliest stages of boot? > It says 751M in pages, 733M free
Yes, but specifically : vm_page: page table size: 786414 entries (43008k) vm_page: DMA: pages: 4080 (15M), free: 0 (0M) vm_page: DMA: min:500 low:600 high:1000 vm_page: DIRECTMAP: pages: 233472 (912M), free: 217899 (851M) vm_page: DIRECTMAP: min:11673 low:14008 high:23347 the "high" threshold. If you add all the high thresholds together, you'll know how much memory must be free before the pageout daemon stops. > After loading aptitude, it tells me there are 535M free. Just before hang, > I see 526M free and it remains there with "total progress" not even starting > and nothing to do > (since the system was freshly upgraded with apt-get, I just removed a > package, thus there was nothing to download) > > Should I check memory differently? at a glance, I don't think we are going > out of mem here. >From what you describe, it doesn't seem to be a hang caused by this. With your amount of memory, you shouldn't even have a HIGHMEM segment, which makes bugs even less likely. So I don't know what happened to your system, or if you're doing something wrong or not. I've just installed a Hurd system on a VM myself, and I had paging problems when upgrading from the snapshot to unstable, but once I assigned 2g of RAM, I could upgrade without too much trouble with aptitude. I use it on all my machines, Linux and Hurd, and never have such issues. -- Richard Braun