Hi!
quoted
But I'm able to compile kernel (-j 10) on 128MB machine, and I tried
cat /dev/zero | grep foo to exhaust memory... and could not reproduce
the deadlock. Should I pingflood? Tweak down ammount of atomic memory
avaialable to make deadlocks easier to reproduce?
I usually test swap over NFS in the following manner, I setup a regular
inet service on the machine (apache or a bunch of ncat sockets piping to
files or something) and run a heavy workload on the machine (128M):
2*64M file backed thrashers and 2*64M anonymous thrashers. Then I start
clients for the regular inet service, wait for a bit, and shut down the
NFS server.
This makes the machine grind to a halt, I then restart the NFS server,
wait for it to reconnect and the client to come alive again.
Without the last few swap-over-NFS patches this last bit - getting back
out of that situation - never happens.
The basic idea is to make connectivity to the machine where swap traffic
goes very hard (pull a cable, cleanly shut down the server) and to keep
other network traffic pounding the machine.
Hmm, I could not get swap-over-ata-over-ethernet to break. Maybe I
should not have local / filesystem, because it allows kernel to get
rid of some memory pressure by dropping clean pages? Plus I guess
ata-over-ethernet has some significant advantages, as it works over
ethernet directly, not over IP.
Pavel
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