Out of memory?

Hi list,

I've run into memory problems. I'm experimenting with Gimp, and working
with relatively large images (3000 x 3000 pixels). I'm also working with
large fonts (>100 pixels).

Problem is that the kernel VM layer starts to kill my processes when
they get really big re. memory footprint. Here are the massages from the
kernel:

Jun 12 10:53:13 piglet kernel: VM: killing process gimp
Jun 12 10:55:03 piglet kernel: VM: killing process X
Jun 12 10:59:46 piglet kernel: VM: killing process X
Jun 12 12:04:27 piglet kernel: VM: killing process xfs

and so on... acording to the comment in arch/ppc/mm/fault.c, this
happens when for some reason the kernel cannot satisfy a paging request.

xfs gets killed when rendering a really big font, X when sending it over
to gimp, and gimp when working with large images....

What reason is there to kill a process for memory reasons? Does a single
process need to fit _entirely_ into RAM, or can part of a process be
swapped out? In all of the above cases, I've always had over 100 megs of
swap free. Or is there a fixed limit on how big a process can get?

Thanks

Michel

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Michel Lanners                 |  " Read Philosophy.  Study Art.
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email   mlan@cpu.lu            |
http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan        |                     Learn Always. "


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