[ltp] Re: problem with Thinkpad 770X crashing

[Moses DeJong]

Hello again.

I think I have found the cause of my Thinkpad 770X going down when
debugging a large program in gdb. When I watch the system with
top, I have noticed that all the regular memory (128 Megs) and
all of the swap space (256 Megs) gets eaten up by gdb. When
the amount of swap space goes to 0, my machine freezes up for
a minute or two. It comes back most of the time, and then goes
down for another minute or two. This now seems like a Kernel
problem. Does anyone know what should happen when the system runs
out of swap space? Is this a kernel bug related to Thinkpads or
is this a more general problem with all Linux systems.

Thanks
Mo DeJong


On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Moses DeJong wrote:

> Hi all.
> 
> I have a Thinkpad 770X (the 1200x1000 model), and I have been
> running into a strange problem. It seems to be related to X.
> I am using RedHat 5.2 upgraded to 2.2.9 and the X server from
> http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_xfree.html for my Cyber9397.
> 
> I seem to be able to reproduce this problem by running
> mozilla (from the CVS) and then attaching to the parent
> process using gdb. gdb attaches and starts loading the
> shared libs, but after a bunch of libs are loaded the
> whole system freezes up. X is still running but the system
> is completely stuck. Now here is where it gets strange.
> After about 30 seconds, the disk spins back up and X
> starts to redraw the screen. Then it gets stuck again
> and the disk spins down. This process continues about
> 3 or 4 times. It seems like even the kernel is stuck,
> I can not log into the system over the network and
> if I press ALT-SysRQ-e or something, it is not processed
> until the next time the disk spins up again. If the
> Alt-SysRQ-e works, then the XDM session will reset
> and I will see the XDM login box again. At that point
> I can log in but I can not switch back into "console"
> mode (can't switch out of X using Ctrl-Alt-F1).
> 
> I poked around in /var/log/messages after this happened
> one time and nothing strange showed up in there.
> 
> Has anyone run into this kind of problem before with
> a Thinkpad laptop? Is there some kind of kernel option
> or kernel logger I could try to compile with that might
> help track down this problem? Any help would be great.
> 
> Thanks
> Mo DeJong

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