RPI3 swap experiments (insufficient swap)

[bob prohaska]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2018 at 06:19:43PM +0100, Jamie Landeg-Jones wrote:
> 
> Unfortunately/Fortunately, I've experienced the same OOM issues, easily replicable,
> on the rpi3, but without any disk errors reported (when using swap only on
> microsd and when only on usb)

That matches my usual experience. The "disk errors"  show up under duress,
as when the machine is deliberately run out of swap. Much more rarely, they
turn up on a reboot, seemingly about the time the system mounts the filesystems.

At one point a series of reboots failed consecutively. Simply going to single
user first, then exiting the shell, allowed a successful startup.

Does anything special happen on the very first reference to a storage device
during startup?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska