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Old 17th June 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gosha View Post
..What could have happened? How do I find out? (I tried checking in /var/crash, and there's a file...
Please read the following man pages:
  • crash(8) Please make special note the first paragraph under Analyzing a dump which describes two files which might be found in /var/crash, how they are named and what they contain.
  • savecore(8) This is a program run by rc(8) during boot. The man page describes what this program does, and what files are placed in /var/crash by it.
Quote:
...there's a file that if opened with cat shows a number: 4096).
This would be /var/crash/minfree, I assume. I have to assume because you didn't name the file. Please note the date and time of the file's creation or last modification. It is described in the savecore(8) man page.
Quote:
...Is there any chance that this problems are caused by ext2?
With the information you've provided, that's as good a guess as any other. I certainly don't know, and couldn't tell you. It could be memory demands by the fsck program consumed all available RAM and swap space.

From your fstab, there is no swap space defined.
By default, if the "b" partition of the boot drive is defined as swap in the drive's disklabel, the OS will use that space as swap on boot, automatically, without an fstab entry. But only that boot drive's "b" partition. Other swap space must be defined in the fstab or added manually.
In order to get a valid dump for analysis, swap space must be larger than physical memory.

If your system runs out of swap space or physical RAM during normal operation, it will prevent new processes from starting, and may cause a hang for any process (userland or kernel) which requests additional memory. This could result in a hung system.

The swapctl(8) and swapon(8) commands provide manual control. The top(8), vmstat(8), and systat(8) utilities can give an admin additional insight.

Last edited by jggimi; 17th June 2009 at 12:03 PM.
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