> We haven't installed VM yet. The Linux test LPAR has 512MB of > memory, of > which over 480MB is shown as the buffer, crippling the system.
This is actually normal behavior -- if the RAM is unused for other purposes, it gets used for disk buffers. I don't think this is the root cause of the problem -- something else is happening that is causing your LPAR to croak. Unfortunately, since you're running in LPAR, short of single-stepping the LPAR from the HW console, it's almost impossible to determine what is causing the problem w/o editing a lot of stuff in the startup scripts which you'd have to go back and undo later. > Would you know how FSCK works ? fsck is the equivalent of MS-DOS's "scandisk.exe". It verifies the integrity of the internal structures in the filesystem and can optionally repair most minor (and some major) inconsistencies. It operates on individual blocks, and usually (depending on the architecture and OS) does not buffer I/O as it tends to be working on things that would be really, really unhappy if the updates were not atomic and guaranteed. > Is it supposed to allocate > and free the > buffer space for the file system ? No. fsck is a repair and verification tool. It has no control over buffering or buffer allocation policy. > Would you recommend that > we run FSCK > regularly ? No. Like any useful power tool, it can maim as well as heal. Use manual fsck's only when necessary. You can do serious harm with fsck if you use it casually. > Is there a way to force the system to free the buffer ? The 'sync' command forces the system to flush the contents of buffers to disk, but given that you are using the 2.2-based 7.0 kernel, you have little or no control over memory allocations to buffers. You could potentially write to kernel memory to try to trigger a flush, but this is NOT recommended. Your gun, your foot, your restore from tape...8-( You may also want to verify that you have the most recent LVM code. There are some behavior enhancements that reduce the amount of I/O done to identify VGs at boot in recent releases. Again, since you are running very old kernel code, you may need to do some tinkering to make the current LVM code work properly. FWIW, I'd recommend concentrating on installing VM rather than spending time with Linux in LPAR. You'll avoid wasting a lot of time on these issues, and you'll have a much more useful system as a result. --d b
