From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S272705AbTHEM6w (ORCPT ); Tue, 5 Aug 2003 08:58:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S272718AbTHEM6w (ORCPT ); Tue, 5 Aug 2003 08:58:52 -0400 Received: from mailgw.cvut.cz ([147.32.3.235]:28060 "EHLO mailgw.cvut.cz") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S272705AbTHEM6W (ORCPT ); Tue, 5 Aug 2003 08:58:22 -0400 From: "Petr Vandrovec" Organization: CC CTU Prague To: skraw@ithnet.com Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 14:57:43 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: decoded problem in 2.4.22-pre10 Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.50 Message-ID: <94429E25D11@vcnet.vc.cvut.cz> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > On 5 Aug 03 at 14:23, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote: > > > > Hello Petr, > > > > at this time I can't provide you with details or exact reporting as the box has > > to be used for finding the 2.4.22-pre stability problem I see. And since the > > crashes take quite some time to occur I cannot reboot and check out what's the > > deal with the vmware modules. One more thing. VMware creates file in /tmp, unlinks it, and then file gradually expands as VM is initialized, so it grews from 0 to your guest memory size + videoram size + ~5MB, while at same time all portions of that file are MAP_SHARED to several processes. And at exit VMware does ftruncate(xxx,0) to throw away unneeded data, preventing them from hitting disk on subsequent (f)sync(), and this ftruncate() happens while other processes which have mmapped file are doing munmap or exit, finding dirty pages which have no underlying storage anymore during cleanup... Both these operations were observed to cause problems in the past - - on startup long ago reiserfs had problems with grewing unlinked files, on shutdown kernel's mm raced with ftruncate. Both these problems are currently fixed, but maybe some other race appeared somewhere? Best regards, Petr Vandrovec