You are probably haunted by a bad issue with DMA memory and running out of
it. Your top is missing -SH since then you would probably see the
pagedameon go bananas. The problem is you have not enough memory below 4G
but the pagedaemon is not able to properly free memory there since it has
no proper tracking for that condition. It only knows memory is short and
tries to drop as much as possible over and over again. As a result your
system becomes unresponsive.
The boot loader can print the memory map. Which should show you
how much memory is below 4G (I think the command is machine mem).
This is a known issue and there is some work going on to fix the problem.
--
:wq Claudio
Thanks, Claudio. Let me know if I can help by testing anything.
In case it's useful, here is the output of "machine memory" at the
boot prompt. Transcribed by hand so there are probably errors.
boot> machine memory
Region 0: type 1 at 0x0 for 609KB
Region 1: type 2 at 0xf0000 for 64KB
Region 2: type 2 at 0xfec00000 for 20480KB
Region 3: type 2 at 0xe0000000 for 262144KB
Region 4: type 2 at 0x98400 for 31KB
Region 5: type 2 at 0xcfdf0000 for 64KB
Region 6: type 1 at 0x100000 for 3404292KB
Region 7: type 3 at 0xcfde3000 for 52KB
Region 8: type 4 at 0xcfde0000 for 12KB
REgion 9: type 1 at 0x100000000 for 13369344KB
Low ram: 609KB High ram: 3404292KB
Total free memory: 16774245KB
--
James
