On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Nuutti Kotivuori wrote:

> If swap is enabled for a virtual machine, and the virtual machine
> actually swaps something, swapoff at shutdown hangs the machine. 

Here's another nasty hang that I first blundered into last night, which 
probably is unrelated but which might be helpful.  The default max size of 
tmpfs is half your physical memory.  If the UML RAM image is in tmpfs, and 
is configured larger than this (remember to leave space for inodes and for 
other clients like KDE), and you make it use the RAM, the machine sounds 
like it's swapping a bunch of stuff, and UML pretty quickly gets a "kernel 
mode signal 7", SIGBUS, which is logical when you think about it.  So don't 
do that.

If all your tmpfs's add up to more than your swap space plus physical 
memory, and you fill them up, then the *host* will get a kernel panic.  So 
don't do that either.

This came up when I was doing an online update of my UML's distro, which 
used a lot of I/O buffers.  When I limited the configured RAM size to fit 
in tmpfs, the online update was finished with no problems.  Swapoff did not 
hang the machine.  But I can't be sure whether the UML swapped anything; I 
kind of doubt it.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA  90095-1555
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]    http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)


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