We have been testing a 2.2.0 kernel on a system with 2 Gigs of RAM and are
seeing some serious problems. The system in question is a Dell PowerEdge
6300/400. This is a quad Xeon 400Mhz system with 2Gigs of RAM, two
AIC 7890 SCSI controllers, one AIC 7860 SCSI controller and 4 9 Gig disks.
We have eliminated the SCSI controllers as the source of our problem by
deactivating them and using a BusLogic BT958 controller instead. Here is
the problem. When we do something that causes huge amounts of RAM to be
used as buffers (750 Meg or more), the filesystems get corrupted badly and
network cards stop working (the NIC is a DEC 500-BA). We have also ruled
out the network driver as the source of the trouble since the problem
occurs using either the de4x5 driver or the tulip driver. We can
reproduce this problem reliably by doing the following:
1. Create a large file (750 Megabytes in our tests).
2. ftp or rcp it to the big RAM machine. While this is going on, we can
see buffer usage increase using free.
3. repeat step 2 until some buffer usage approaches the amount of RAM
installed.
At this point, we start getting filesystem corruption and depending on the
ethernet driver, either repeated errors on the console or no response. We
are really eager to get a quad Xeon system in place with this much memory,
but it we are going to trash the filesystem every time we approach memory
exhaustion (which will probably occur more often than we like), we cannot
proceed.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Tom Schenk
Systems Admin
Deja News, Inc.
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| Tom Schenk | Use Linux! | All opinions expressed |
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Friends don't let | are mine and not those |
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | friends do Windows! | of my employer. |
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