[BUGS] clearing out swap space ..

[Andrew Reilly]

Hi Jonathan,

On Tue, 7 Oct 2008 22:42:36 +1100
jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:
>    i'm wondering if what i am seeing on a freebsd v6.2-release (iso-cdrom images
>    cut to cd) installed been runing for a about 6 months and has been doing this
>    ever since installation.

I thought that 6.2 was fairly stable, but that was a long time
ago, for me.  Plan to upgrade to 7.1 soon after it's released is
my first advice.  The 7-stable series is looking to be a corker,
IMO.

>    it seems to to slowly consume swap space and just locks up when it exhausts teh
>    available swap space .. teh screen display verticle bars right across teh
>    screen all the 16 colours over and over again.

How do you know that it's consuming swap space?  Is it running
out and killing random processes?  (Killing the next faulting
process is the expected behaviour of a system like modern FreeBSD
that will overcommit virtual memory.)  The other symptom that you
will probably notice is lots of extra swap behaviour: you'll hear
the disk and things will be slow.

Frankly, I can't see your display anomaly being caused by
exhaustion of swap.  That sounds like something is going badly
wrong in your graphics card driver, or perhaps in the hardware of
your graphics card itself.  It's not overheating, is it?

>    i never had thes problems with freebsd v2.x (when i ran x11) or v5.x just with
>    v6 .. i'm trying to understand what is going on here ?? i've looked at man and
>    couldn't find any thing that looks like it would be appropriate.

Man pages can generally only describe how things *ought* to
behave, when they're working properly, because when something is
broken, there's often an unlimited and unimaginable number of
ways that it can misbehave...

What you describe with your graphics card sounds either like a
hardware fault (most likely, imo), or something in kernel space
going so far off the rails that it's writing repetitive jibberish
to vast blocks of physically addressed memory (that's how it
could violate the memory management restrictions that should
otherwise stop anything other than the graphics card driver from
writing to the graphics card.)

>    pointers suggestions/explanation .. appreciated

I doubt that this explanation will have helped, I'm afraid, but
it's all that I can think of, at the moment...

Good luck.

Cheers,

Andrew.