Re: Fedora Core 2 - Processes Eating 20X more memory

From: Brian Ceccarelli (spam_at_accipiter.com)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:29:19 GMT

James,

    I just the binary on Fedora Core 1. It works using the usual 16MB of
virtual memory (virtual = swap + RAM).
So, I submit that there is a BIG NASTY BUG in the Linux 2.6 kernel regarding
memory management. The same binary uses 481 MB of virtual memory in
Fedora Core 2.

    I confirm both process sizes by issuing a gcore. The resulting core
size on Fedore Cora 1 is 16 MB. The resulting core size on Fedora Core 2
is 481 MB. BTW, it doesn't matter if I use the SMP kernel or not. I get
the same memory problem.

Brian

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Not very encouraging :(
    ... the 2.4 kernel is receiving complains even from the Linux community ... anyone post a problem in the linux ng's I follow, ... of message about virtual memory. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.security_admin)
  • Re: Why system call need to copy the date from the userspace before using it
    ... In virtual memory terms, each userspace program resides in the ... while the kernel takes up the higher addresses. ... the supposed buffer, does not belong to kernel space. ... Now the only thing that can go wrong is that the user program told the ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: mmap, the language go, problems with the linux kernel
    ... There popped up a serious problem by implementing a fast memory ... Maybe some experienced kernel hacker ... Suddenly the page allocation ... virtual memory lookup footprint. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: Zones in Linux
    ... The issue is how much of the memory is visible in kernel *virtual memory* ... There is a total visibility of 4GB of virtual memory. ... physical memory are mapped 1-to-1 into kernel virtual memory space. ...
    (comp.os.linux.development.system)
  • Re: Zones in Linux
    ... aren't fully arranged to NormalZone? ... The issue is how much of the memory is visible in kernel *virtual memory* at a given time. ... In the "normal" x86 linux kernel configuration, the virtual address space is subdivided between user-space which gets 3GB and 1GB for the kernel address space. ... the first X pages of physical memory are mapped 1-to-1 into kernel virtual memory space. ...
    (comp.os.linux.development.system)