Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 08 Dec 1999 03:26:55 +0000 | From | Christopher Curtis <> | Subject | Out of Swap, VFS Disk Change, and rescanning device busses |
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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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