On Sat, 17 May 2008, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
quoted text
>
> My guess is that when the kernel runs out of MemFree and starts reclaiming the 
> cache, something is deadlocking somewhere. Just doing a:
> 
> cat /dev/zero >/path/to/file

Do this on the console (and having a serial console or working netconsole 
is a wonderful thing to log it, because otherwise it will generally just 
scroll off the screen), and trigger SysRQ-w. That dumps all blocked tasks 
to the screen.

You may need to do

	echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq 

before that to enable it.

(Or if you have some things still running because they haevn't hit the 
lock that causes the deadlock, you can try

	echo w > /proc/sysrq-trigger

rather than the key combination).

			Linus
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