From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Dec 3 5:55:36 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from penguin.wise.edt.ericsson.se (penguin-ext.wise.edt.ericsson.se [194.237.142.110]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B41A514CA1 for ; Fri, 3 Dec 1999 05:55:21 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from usenet@erix.ericsson.se) Received: from super.du.uab.ericsson.se (root@super.du.uab.ericsson.se [134.138.176.16]) by penguin.wise.edt.ericsson.se (8.9.3/8.9.3/WIREfire-1.5) with ESMTP id OAA17325 for ; Fri, 3 Dec 1999 14:54:31 +0100 (MET) Received: from news.du.uab.ericsson.se (news [134.138.176.24]) by super.du.uab.ericsson.se (8.9.3/8.9.3/erix-1.7) with ESMTP id OAA21485 for ; Fri, 3 Dec 1999 14:54:30 +0100 (MET) Received: (from news@localhost) by news.du.uab.ericsson.se (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1/news-1.1) id OAA06759 for freebsd-stable@freebsd.org; Fri, 3 Dec 1999 14:54:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from GATEWAY by news with netnews for freebsd-stable@freebsd.org (freebsd-stable@freebsd.org) To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Date: 03 Dec 1999 14:54:28 +0100 From: Kent Boortz Message-ID: Organization: Ericsson Telecom AB, Stockholm, Sweden Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Subject: Out of swap hangs machine Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Maybe I'm a bit confused about the expected bahaviour but I was under the impression that running a program as an ordinary user is not supposed to make an Unix system unusable. That is what makes a big difference between Unix and operating systems like Windows98 or MacOS. I have had several crashes where I can't access my machine console, i.e. X-Windows has hung, I can't terminate X with ctrl-alt-backspace and I can't switch console with ctlr-alt-F1. The cause has been running an ordinary program, ImageMagick, with a rather large file reaching the swap space limit. In my /var/log/messages I can see Dec 1 01:48:48 lolo /kernel: swap_pager: out of swap space Dec 1 01:48:49 lolo /kernel: pid 34092 (montage), uid 825, was killed: out of swap space Dec 1 01:59:23 lolo /kernel: swap_pager: out of swap space Dec 1 02:00:27 lolo /kernel: pid 34113 (montage), uid 825, was killed: out of swap space Dec 1 02:00:29 lolo last message repeated 3 times Dec 1 02:07:27 lolo /kernel: swap_pager: out of swap space At this stage the machine is unusable and I had to reboot with the hardware switch, no more log entries. Dec 1 04:53:01 lolo /kernel: swap_pager: I/O error - pagein failed; blkno 856138, size 4096, error 22 Dec 1 04:53:01 lolo /kernel: vm_fault: pager read error, pid 544 (convert) I had to use the hardware switch this time as well, nothing more in the log. I run FreeBSD 3.3-STABLE #2 (cvsup 22 Nov) Could someone clearify this matter? Is it my setup that allow ordinary users too much freedom or is this a problem with FreeBSD? kent To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message