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SubjectOut of Swap, VFS Disk Change, and rescanning device busses
Hello,

[please Cc: me, not on list]

A comment and some questions:

The other day while running top, I noticed that I was using practically
all my swap. Throwing caution to the wind, I ran "apt-get -f upgrade"
to upgrade my system. I promptly ran out of memory and the system
(essentially) halted. The hard drive did not churn, but the machine was
responsive to pings. Mouse movement, etc, was non-existant, even after
about 2 hours. I am currently running kernel 2.2.12, but ran into a
similar problem earlier in the 2.2 series when I set the tile cache size
to 1 in the GIMP and overflowed the available swap. I appreciate
Linux's effort in trying to remanage the cache to give programs the
memory they want, but I think it might be better to not try so hard.
I'm not sure how to go about it, or if it's already possible (or not
possible at all), but wanted to mention it. Maybe start returning
ENOMEM sooner if contention is high or the cache space is too small
(definable via /proc or such).

My next question regards the VFS: Disk Changed messages. I would like
to capture these events somehow via shell script and/or daemon. Are
there any programs that will intercept this message or can be notified
of the change, and spawn a script. Like init? I've looked but have
been unsuccessful at finding anything.

And finally, device busses: is it that they are only probed at boot
time? SCSI busses and can broken and devices be added or removed, but
Linux doesn't seem to deal with this very well. SCSI has it's own
problems because of the way sd[a-n] devices are assigned, but I also
have a removable IDE drive bay. I'd like to be able to plug a hard disk
into the IDE bus with this bay and tell Linux to rescan that bus;
similarly for removing the drive, Linux would want to know to flush the
buffers, etc. Is it possible to do this?

Thanks for your time,
Chris


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