[ale] linux on a 486

[Joseph A. Knapka]

Wandered Inn wrote:
> 
> "Joseph A. Knapka" wrote:
> >
> > Wandered Inn wrote:
> > >
> > > Right now, I'm attempting another Slack install with a 48 mb swap.  I'm
> > > still getting random failures, and when I do, I switch to another virt.
> > > console and do the install of that piece by hand.  I don't know if this
> > > will work, but I'm going to follow this through to either completion, or
> > > the point at which the install crashes completely.  Should be an
> > > interesting learning experience.  Going on it's third day now, although
> > > I'm not able to attend to it immediately.  (ie, failures in the middle
> > > of the night, got to get some sleep. )
> > >
> > > I'll post a summary once this completes or dies. :(
> >
> > Just out of curiosity curiosity: how do you *know* the problem is
> > memory?
> > What if you start "top" or "vmstaton another virt and watch what happens
> > to
> > RAM and swap as the installation proceeds?
> 
> I don't know it's ram.  But, I often seen the single word 'killed' on
> the screen.  I know that there is little if any real ram left, which
> would make me believe that that is the problem.
> 
> I'm not sure what else it could be.  What else would cause a false EOF
> or crc error on a tar file?  NFS timeout?  I suppose, but I don't seen
> anything pointing that direction.

Don't know. It probably *is* a memory problem, but I would expect that
with sufficient swap you would be able to work around that. The
only thing that could stop that is if RAM is filling with unfreeable
pages, or if the kernel is unable to kick a page out of RAM due
to inability to allocate swap space. Or any number of other things
I haven't thought of. It would just be interesting to know the VM
state when the failures occur.
 
> Top fails to start, complaints of missing libs.  vmstaton, is that a
> typo??

Yes, I meant "vmstat". Or just "cat /proc/meminfo", to be immune
from all library dependencies.

-- Joe Knapka
"You know how many remote castles there are along the gorges? You
 can't MOVE for remote castles!" -- Lu Tze re. Uberwald
// Linux MM Documentation in progress:
// http://home.earthlink.net/~jknapka/linux-mm/vmoutline.html
2nd Lbl A + 1 = 2nd Pause 2nd Prt GTO 2 R/S
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