Memtest problem / my kernel question

[Ben Pfaff]

Sean <picasso@madflower.com> writes:

> My money is still on a bad ram stick.

No, if the message that Alan reported from the VM is the only
error, then that's normal for swapping environments.  It means
that the kernel couldn't find as much free virtual memory as it
needed.  This is usually when the kernel starts killing processes
to free up memory.

A "good" way to make this happen on my system is to fire up
gphoto and download a full memory card of JPEGs from the camera,
then click on several photos in succession.  It will swap heavily
then processes will die (be killed by the kernel), typically
gphoto or the X server.

Alan: Try memtest86 instead.  You boot into it (via LILO or
whatever) instead of running it as a process.  In Debian it's in
the hwtools package.

> On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Torgo Jr wrote:
> 
> > On the machine which I've reported some strange problems 
> > before:  I ran "memtest 50000000", and the output is mostly 
> > just lines like:
> > 
> > VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for kswapd

-- 
"A computer is a state machine. 
 Threads are for people who cant [sic] program state machines."
--Alan Cox