update (bdflush) will not run persistently as a daemon on a 6.1 box/ I have 5.1 and 6.0 boxes and it's running fine. This is bad, the buffer on my machine grew to almost all physical memory (249 of 256 M), and caused massive failures: Out of memory errors in demesg and zombies. After doing many unpleasant things I was able to prevent it going over 80 M, but this still caused problems. As a temporary fix I'm using 200% CPU (to go over the 1.0 load avg I'm told is necessary to force flushing), and this is working for now... but it's most uncool. bdflush needs to be fixed. Ideally also, it would be nice that when an Out of memory message occurs, the disk buffer is flushed.. perhaps even: before a process spawns, is there at least as much free memory as the parent uses? if not flush buffer...
Is update/bdflush still needed after kernel 2.2.8? === http://www.kernelnotes.org/kernel/v2.2/0-9.html ... Linux 2.2.8 patch - patch-2.2.8.gz (11-May-99) [Patch Browser] Notes: Due to the changes in this kernel's buffer code, you may want to disable the update (bdflush) daemon in your init scripts. ... ===