Hide Forgot
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021204 Description of problem: Using swapfile on ext3 under heavy load causes serious problems with system stability (applications behave like with broken RAM). Sometimes even couses system crashes (kernel panic or freezing when halting). Kernel is 2.4.18-19.7.x on RH Linux 7.3. No problems with same configuration and swap partition. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. create swapfile on ext3 partition 2. mount it with swapon 3. use some application, which will need lots of memory and CPU. Actual Results: Application unstable, often crashing. Sometimes whole system going down with kernel panic. Additional info:
Are you booting with data=journal per chance? How is the swapfile being created? Swapfiles must not be sparse files. Also, providing the kernel messages for any crashes would be helpful.
I'm booting without any additional flags for ext3. The boot command in grub.conf is as follows: title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-19.7.x) root (hd0,1) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-19.7.x ro root=/dev/hda5 hda=autotune hdd=ide-scsi Filesystems are: /dev/hda2 /boot ext3 /dev/hda5 / ext3 Swapfile was created on / partition (made /swap/ directory for it, if that's relevant). By the book - dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=262144 And one more thing. No doubt about it, after getting rid of that swapfile my system is way more stable.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/