On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 04:20:08PM +0300, Noam Meltzer wrote:
> Hi,
> Recently I have been getting this wierd error from my kernel, after some
> time my machine is up:
>
> VM: killing process sh
grepping the kernel sources shows this (in arch/i386/mm/fault.c):
/*
* We ran out of memory, or some other thing happened to us that made
* us unable to handle the page fault gracefully.
*/
out_of_memory:
if (tsk->pid == 1) {
yield();
goto survive;
}
up_read(&mm->mmap_sem);
printk("VM: killing process %s\n", tsk->comm);
if (error_code & 4)
do_exit(SIGKILL);
goto no_context;
I do not know what this actually means, since I never got it myself.
I do get occasionally "Out of Memory: Killed process", which comes
from mm/oom_kill.c, and is the more "common" place for such things.
Maybe it happens on severe lacks of memory, I don't know.
Anyway, you write (below) you have 16MB. This is quite small for
a desktop machine. My best explanation is that you started doing
things you did not do in the past, and maxed out your 16MB.
--
Didi
>
> This is followed by not being able to run commands like "ps", "pptp",
> and others, and the way I found to solve it, is just to reboot. (bahhh,
> this is not windows)
>
> My first instinct was that this is an hardware problem, prolly with the
> RAM chips.
> But after some googling I found that I'm not the only one getting this
> error, but I haven't managed to find any good explanation about this,
> expect being led to believe that this might be a kernel bug.
>
> My machine is a Cyrix 486DX2, with 16MB of RAM.
> I use slackware8 with kernel 2.2.19.
>
> This configuration has worked well for about two years now, and very
> impressive uptimes. But recently this error began.
>
> Does any1 has anyidea what this error means and why it can happen?
>
> --
> Noam Meltzer
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ICQ: 4853872
>
>
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