SUMMARY II: SUN690/MP hang! help! help!!

From: Jian Ye (ye@software.org)
Date: Tue Jun 21 1994 - 20:31:56 CDT


Last summary I suggested that a patch for the swapon large file was the
fix for the misterous hang problem:

100645-01 4.1.2;4.1.3: swapon with very large swap files hangs

The problem went a way for one week and then came back again.

I even went as far as replaced the motherboard, problem still persisted.
Just before I was going to pack up my bag and leave SPC for good,
inspiration hit me, why do I even need the file for swaping.

I took it away, the machine stayed up for one week, then as you all
probabely guessed it ran out of memory. So I had to enable the
swap file and machine hanged helplessly two days after. I said what
the heck, let me give this dead horse one last kick.

I took an old sun3 disk, made the whole disk a b partition, mounted as
swap disk and took the swapfile off-line. The machine has not crashed
or hang for almost a month now. I keep my finger crossed.

What I am trying to say is:

avoid fancy stuff like swapon a file, use most nature way, ie b partition.

If you have to use a swapfile, watch out for hang, panic on wakeup and
swtch call. If the swapfile is not too big, consider put two lines
in your /etc/rc.local that remove and recreate the file when the machine is
rebooted. I had a LX which ran fine for months and all of a sudden, it
crashed three times in one day. After I delete and recreated the
swapfile, it runs fine. I guess the problem is that the swapfile
may get corrupted sometimes and cause strange memory problem.

I hate my job!!!

I hope you guys have better luck than mine.

-- Jian



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