[PLUG] Problem w/ swap

Shannon C. Dealy dealy at deatech.com
Sat Jul 13 00:18:03 UTC 2002


On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Keith wrote:

>  I had a file go into a loop and max out my HD to 100%.
> The problem now appears to be that the swap partition
> is no longer functioning. I also have a new device
> that is mounted /dev/shm, here is the fstab file:
>
> LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
> LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
> none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
> none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
> none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
> /dev/hdb3               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
> /dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
> /dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
> /dev/hda1		/mnt/hda		vfat	noauto,user,ro	0 0
>
> When I do a df command only the /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdb2 are displayed.
> Any ideas on what I should do?

I'm guessing your problem is with the /dev/shm mount, it is a "tmpfs" file
system.  This is used in a manner similar to /tmp or /var/tmp, except that
the tmpfs file system keeps all of the data in virtual memory (this is
very useful for swap files on virtual machines and other applications
that need fast access temp files).  So if you have any programs using the
tmpfs file system, it could easily consume all of your swap space.  Since
it is being mounted at /dev/shm, I would take a look at this directory to
see what is being stored there.  If you have the kernel sources handy, you
can read a little more about tmpfs under the Documentation/filesystems
directory.

Shannon C. Dealy      |               DeaTech Research Inc.
dealy at deatech.com     |          - Custom Software Development -
                      |    Embedded Systems, Real-time, Device Drivers
Phone: (800) 467-5820 | Networking, Scientific & Engineering Applications
   or: (541) 451-5177 |                  www.deatech.com






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