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2.4.22-gentoo-r2 eats memory?!
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NeighborhoodGullwings
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 3:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

aengus9 wrote:

This boots, but the module for my network card won't load. Are modules from 2.4.22 not compatible with modules for 2.4.20?
That could be the case. Or maybe you upgraded your compiler between kernel versions?

Can you boot from a LiveCD and then fix your system from there?

How much swap space do you have? Can you make more?

This sure is seeming to be a weird problem afterall.
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r1chardgreen
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 3:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

aengus9 wrote:
Ok, I'm screwed. If anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate it.


You are not screwed. With linux you are rarely totally screwed. Thats one reason we like it so much ;)

Here's one suggestion to get going again:

Boot from an install CD - e.g. a gentoo bootable CD, though other CDs, such as knoppix etc would probably work.

Use single user mode, then manually start any networking componants you need to, by following sections in the Gentoo install docs.

Next follow the gentoo install docs to mount your existing partitions and then chroot. (Of course, don't do any of the initial disk partitioning and stuff or you will delete everything on your system).

At that stage you are ready to reconfigure your boot loader for an older kernel you already have in /boot, download older kernel source, patch new kernels, whatever you want to do.

Once you are fixed up, and boot loader is correctly configured, reboot.

RG
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alexbuell
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 9:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yep, I can confirm the patch fixes the problem for me. Two days now and no more problems!
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 11:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:

ep, I can confirm the patch fixes the problem for me. Two days now and no more problems!


That means that whatever we seen reiser is a different issue. Strange.
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imageek
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 12:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ok call me a n00b or whatever, i cant get this patch to apply. Im doing it from the wrong place or something. Here is the error im getting.

cd /usr/src/linux/fs/ext3/
Code:

imageek ext3 # patch <patch_ext3

patching file dir.c
patch: **** malformed patch at line 6: static int ext3_release_dir (struct inode * inode, struct file * filp)


maybe its too early and im not awake enough or something. Someone give me a clue or a nudge in the right direction.
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r1chardgreen
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 11:39 pm    Post subject: another happy little vegemite Reply with quote

The ext3 patch fine works for me too. I noticed that the release of memory only seems to happen when something else demands it (at least according the to little memory monitor thing on my task bar) - could that be why some posts in this thread reckon the ext3 patch did not work?

Also, imageek, applying the patch... the line that throws the error when you run patch is at line 5 in my patch file, not line 6. You may have a linewrap or the diff command left in at the top or something. Also I had to use used 'patch -l' so there must be some white space differences. But anyway, it's one line - so just type it in ;)

RG
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imageek
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 10, 2004 5:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

yeah i know and i did just type it in, but i still wanted to know why it didnt work lol. and yeah i must have copied and pasted the patch wrong.
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 4:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Alex,
or anybody else for whom the patch works. Can you post here your free output before and after updatedb. I would really like to see what it looks like when things work properly. Is all the extra memory that updatedb used reported in "buffers" and "cached" columns?

Thanks
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aengus9
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 6:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here's my output after applying the patch and recompiling. No one laugh at the amount of RAM though

Code:

thalia root # free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            37         35          1          0          1          6
-/+ buffers/cache:         28          8
Swap:          133          9        123
Total:         170         45        125
thalia root # ./slocate
thalia root # free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            37         36          0          0          3          1
-/+ buffers/cache:         31          6
Swap:          133         21        112
Total:         170         57        112


Looks like the memory wasn't freed immediately after updatedb ran. I'll check it in the morning and see if any was reclaimed over time.
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

aengus9,
since applying patch, did you in any way see improvment (memory-wise)?
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imageek
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 11:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

anyone know if this is supposed to be fixed in 2.6.1? i installed the gentoo-dev-sources saturday morning and my box was maxed out on memory (1.5gig) by sunday morning.
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 11:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:

nyone know if this is supposed to be fixed in 2.6.1? i installed the gentoo-dev-sources saturday morning and my box was maxed out on memory (1.5gig) by sunday morning.


I do not think so (unless you see the ext3 bug), since people running release candidates for 2.6.1 also had this bug. I think part of the problem is that nobody reported this to kernel people, (Alex reported bug in ext3 which was fixed in 2.6.0). Also, the bugzilla report did not see much activity from developers, so it will take some time for this issue to be resolved.
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imageek
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 11:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

well i went digging around in the source and it does have the patch in the gentoo-dev-sources for 2.6.1, which i am running since saturday. I am showing that almost all of my memory is eaten up. But i have a good chunk in the buffers and cache. Does this mean the memory is there to be used by the system if it needs it? Here is the output of free -mt while i am doing an emerge -uDv world.
Code:

free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1517       1413        103          0        292        463
-/+ buffers/cache:        658        859
Swap:          729          0        729
Total:        2246       1413        833
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imageek
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 12:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

well for some reason it freed up some memory this morning. I swear when i woke up this morning there was only like 12 meg free. So maybe it is working just takes some time.
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tomaw
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 6:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I seem to be having this issue recently with:

Linux tawesley 2.6.1-gentoo #1 SMP Fri Jan 9 19:37:52 GMT 2004 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

and a reiserfs root partition.

Is there a suspected fix as yet?
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 6:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:

I am showing that almost all of my memory is eaten up. But i have a good chunk in the buffers and cache. Does this mean the memory is there to be used by the system if it needs it? Here is the output of free -mt while i am doing an emerge -uDv world.

imageek,
Yes, system can use "buffers" and "cached" memeory whenever necessary, so available memory is basically "free" + "buffers" + "cached".
Try out the patch, and run "free -mt" before and after updatedb run and also after you see the raclaim of memeory. Count up the free memory and post it.
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imageek
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 9:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

well i have upgraded to 2.6.1 gentoo-sources over the weekend and it seems to be patched. and i have been allowing slocate to run every evening in the cron job again and not noticing any performance degredation. i can still post the output but updatedb takes about 30 seconds to run right now and only grabs about 5mb of memory it seems.
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

imageek,
if it is not too much hassle I would like to see actual "free -mt" output.
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imageek
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Code:

 free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1517       1352        164          0        302        485
-/+ buffers/cache:        564        952
Swap:          729          0        729
Total:        2246       1352        893


Ill get you another one in the morning also when i get up.
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chiatello
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

:o
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aengus9
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

After letting my system sit and do nothing all day, no memory appears to have been freed Here is my output of 'free -mt'
Code:

thalia root # free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            37         36          0          0          2          1
-/+ buffers/cache:         32          4
Swap:          133          5        127
Total:         170         41        128


Its exactly what I had after I ran updatedb last night. Does memory one get freed when some other application asks for it?
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mhodak
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 9:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

aengus9 wrote:
Does memory one get freed when some other application asks for it?

If I understand Linux memory management correctly, memory should be freed as soon as application is finished, i.e. the part of memory that application used should be "shifted" into some of "free", "cached" or "buffers". The further freeing can occur only when some cached memory not used for certain time is moved to swap. The rest of memory (used - buffers - cached) cannot be used by anything else (except when system is low in memory, then it can move some part of it to swap), that is it cannot be freed because something is using it.
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aengus9
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 8:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just upgraded my kernel to 2.4.22-gentoo-r4 and I can report that the bug is still present. The patch given earlier doesn't apprear to have been applied. Same story as last time, applied patch, recompiled, memory still doesn't appear to be freed after running updatedb, but at least the system runs.
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alexbuell
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 8:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

aengus9 wrote:
Just upgraded my kernel to 2.4.22-gentoo-r4 and I can report that the bug is still present. The patch given earlier doesn't apprear to have been applied. Same story as last time, applied patch, recompiled, memory still doesn't appear to be freed after running updatedb, but at least the system runs.


I think it's in gentoo-sources 2.4.22-r5 now. I'm downloading to find out if it really is. Hurrah, if true!

[ edited ]

YES!! It's in, at last! Rejoice! :D
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aengus9
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 6:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just download and compiled 2.4.22-r5, and while the patch has been applied, I still don't see memory released after running updatedb. Not sure if this is normal behavior or not, (I'm a bit of a noob) but at least my system runs. I guess I won't worry about it any more, but I'd feel a bit better if I could actually see memory being released. Maybe I'll try to reboot periodically
Code:

thalia root # free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            60         28         32          0          1         15
-/+ buffers/cache:         10         49
Swap:          188          0        188
Total:         248         28        220
thalia root # updatedb
thalia root # free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            60         59          1          0          5          2
-/+ buffers/cache:         51          9
Swap:          188          3        184
Total:         248         63        185
thalia root #


I also upgraded my machine, which is why there's the difference in memory size since my previous posts.
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