yum and low memory kernel behaviour

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

søn, 24.10.2004 kl. 09.31 skrev Gregory Woodbury:
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 03:12:27AM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 02:39 -0400, Gregory Woodbury wrote:
> > > I have a small memory notebook (old Dell Latitude) with only 64MB of
> > > RAM.  It is running FC3t3+rawhide (2004-10-23) using XFCE.  I mostly use
> > > it as an intelligent terminal to other machines across the LAN, however
> > > I expect it to be able to do other things (very) slowly when I need it
> > > to do so.  The system _should_ swap to disk when necessary, but recent
> > > kernels have been more inclined to invoke the OOM killer and kill off
> > > various services.
> > > 
> > > Yum 2.1.10-3 is very good at trigerring this problem.  Trying to create
> > > the pickle for the development repository will consistently kill the
> > > machine.
> > 
> > The pickle for the development repository would be about 200MB of memory
> > to read then write out.
> > 
> > There's no way to do what you want to do in 64M of ram w/o swapping.
> > 
> > -sv
> 
> Of course it can't do it without swapping.
> But it *should* swap and run slowly rather than kill off the machine
> with the OOM_killer.
> Whose problem is it?  The kernel for not managing swap right, or yum for
> not allowing the use of swap space for making the pickle?

How much swap do you have?

And btw - why does not the kernel kill the "perpetrator" - in this case
yum, but i have also seen gs cause this - gs ate al the mem and the
kernel began killing the dock-apps... Starting in the wrong end?

Kyrre