Spontanoeus reboots under load

[Jonathan]

On Thursday 28 August 2003 01:24 pm, Mike Tancsa wrote:
> The PAE commits cause some machines to crash like this. It seems to be
> under load and with low physical memory.

Hi Mike and Doug:

 This evening I reloaded my kernel.GENERIC ( FreeBSD 4.8 RELEASE #0; Thu Apr 3 
13:07:15 GMT 2003) on my FreeBSD laptop and subjected it to terrific swapping 
loads. No crashes happened.  I have 160 Mb RAM and 304 Mb swap space. Here is 
what I did:

1) I started portsdb -Uu (the crashes with STABLE frequently happened when 
this was running)
2) I ran 5 instances of Octave; having it invert a 2000x2000 random floating 
point matrix. Five large matrix inversions in all.
3) I loaded the FreeBSD handbook in a web browser to use up more memory.
4) I clicked on the various desktops to make X constantly repaint the screen 
(I was running Kde at the time).

No crashes at all. I could not get FreeBSD to crash.  At one point I tried to 
load a 4000x4000 floating point matrix while all the above was going on but 
the process was killed. I believe this is the proper behavior; that FreeBSD 
should kill applications that cause an overload. At any rate the original 
RELEASE kernel works OK. I also did a memory test and checked out the other 
components of my laptop with the diagnostic utility. All the hardware checked 
out OK. I will reinstall as one violent crash damaged some inodes.

BTW with the recent STABLE builds never did kill an application that was 
causing an overload. The notebook just locked up. 




		Kind regards,
		Jonathan