On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:02:15 -0700, Josh Goldsmith wrote: > I have a Linksys NSLU2 running 2.6.21 (I can replicate the problem on > 2.6.23 but it isn't fully supported on SlugOS). It is a armv5teb device > with 32MB of RAM, 400+ MB swap on its 160GB USB2 root disk. The machine is > used as a fileserver and to build packages for other ARM devices. It may be > underpowered by today's standard but is a whole lot faster than my first > Linux system (386sx20 with 4MB RAM) but the whole system with disk uses <8 > watts and is silent. > > The problem comes when I try to untar a large file (in this case > linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2). Regardless if I kill off every other process, > eventually the oom-killer will appear and kill either the tar or the shell. > I've tried every tuning option I and my buddy Google could find including > (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit*) with no success. I'm not worried about paging > impacting performance. > > I'd appreciate any help, pointers, or gentle taps with the cluebat.
I'm no VM tuning expert, but I have and still do heavy compile jobs on similarly configured machines, with no OOM problems: I regularly build 2.6 kernels and occasionally also gcc on a 100MHz 486 with 28MB of RAM and perhaps 500MB of swap. It runs a standard but stripped down Fedora Core 4 user-space, with ext3 file systems and a kernel that doesn't include anything non-essential. The machine will swap madly, but the OOM killer never triggers. (All system settings are FC4 defaults. I haven't touched them.) In the past I did a fair amount of package rebuilds and test suite runs on an NSLU2 myself, with a 2.4 Linksys/Openslug kernel, ext3, and a 1GB or perhaps 2GB swap partition on a disk attached via a USB2-to-PATA enclosure. Even when swapping heavily the OOM killer wouldn't trigger. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/