Swap problem with F9 PPC

Rick Stevens ricks at nerd.com
Mon May 19 23:27:07 UTC 2008


Guillaume wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I installed an ibook G4 (256 Mo SDRAM) with Fedora 9 PPC.
> I have a problem with the SWAP.
> 
> - the gnome system appet show me that I don t use the SWAP...
> 
> - when I use top command I get:
> Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    82388k cached
> 
> - the SWAP partition size is 1024 Mo !
> I set it at install time and I verify with now with gparted
> 
> - The SWAP partition is in the /etc/fstab:
> LABEL=SWAP-hda4         swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

Uh, oh.  Methinks I see an issue here.  First, I didn't know you could
use labels for swap partitions (since they don't have a real filesystem
on them).  I've always used the /dev name of the device (in my case
using LVM, it's /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01).

On top of that, partition 4 is the extended partition which contains
/dev/hda5, /dev/hda6 and so on.  Using that as swap (if you could force
it) might cause LOTS of grief.  A dump of "fdisk -l" would be nice.
If you have a /dev/hda5 in there, then using hda4 as swap can be fatal.

> - When I run a task that use some CPU/Memory, It crashs the kernel
> When I does not crash, I get some really bad errors like "can not fork: 
> counld not alocate memory"
> Due to this problem, I can not run yum update on X session, It uses to 
> memory
> I run init 3 and then I run yum update ...
> But It is not a normal behaviour
> 
> Someone have any idea of what happened ?

What does "swapon -s" show?  Here's mine (granted, X86_64):

[root at prophead ~]# swapon -s
Filename                         Type         Size    Used  Priority
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01  partition    2031608 1500  -1

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                       rps2 at nerd.com -
- Hosting Consulting, Inc.                                           -
-                                                                    -
-             To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.               -
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