Bug 135244

Summary:	Swap not working
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Geoff Siddell <geoffrey.siddell>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Dave Jones <davej>
Status:	CLOSED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	2	CC:	pfrields, wtogami
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-10-27 11:48:15 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Geoff Siddell 2004-10-11 10:14:15 UTC

Description of problem: Virtual memory seems to have stopped working
all of a sudden. When I try to open a memory intensive application
such as Gnumeric, Open Office, Printer Configuration or Printing there
 is a pause of several minutes, Open Office never finishes loading.
Also there is a long pause logging in to Gnome but not KDE.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Kernel
2.6.8-1.521

How reproducible: Log in to Gnome or open a memory intensive app.


Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
  
Actual results: Long pauses (5 minutes) or hangs.


Expected results: 20 second pause


Additional info: Problem began right after the box froze at boot time
with an error message "lost interrupt" (if I remember right).
 System monitor shows !00% RAM in use at these times (250 Mb.) but
never any swapping (no disk activity either)

Comment 1 Geoff Siddell 2004-10-12 08:14:13 UTC

Since filing this report I seem to have stumbled on a workaround.
After filing the report I saw that swap was in fact still working but
that there was continuous network activity. On investigating my
network card   settings I discovered that the "Bind to MAC address"
box in "Hardware Device" was ticked, clearing it has solved the problem!
 Still a bug perhaps but not so severe now. What is "Bind to MAC"
anyway?, I dont remember ticking it but it doesn't seem to affect my
home network.

Comment 2 Dave Jones 2004-10-27 05:36:51 UTC

bind to mac is useful if you have 2 NICs in your machine, and you want to ensure
one of them gets eth0 and the other gets eth1.  I highly doubt its related to
your problem.

There's been no major complaints about swap malfunctioning in FC2, so I'm a bit
curious what exactly you see happening. Can you run 'vmstat 1' and then try to
reproduce this bug ? leave it run for a little while (ie, longer than you think
is an acceptable time to be waiting for the app to load), and then cut-n-paste
the vmstat output into this bug. That will allow us to see what was going on at
the time.
(The output of free, and cat /proc/meminfo whilst its under load will also be
useful)

Thanks.

Comment 3 Geoff Siddell 2004-10-27 10:56:02 UTC

The problem seens to have gone, I can't reproduce it now. If it 
recurs then I will carry out the investigations suggested by Dave 
Jones. I can only suggest that if any one else encounters a similar 
glitch , then try playing with your NIC settings as that seemed to do 
the trick for me.