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Old 8th August 2008
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jggimi jggimi is online now
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666 View Post
...sadly this all is really hit and miss.. sometimes vendors just don't entirely comply with standards.
True. Looking at the ACPI-based dmesg, it seems gosha's cardbus is recognized but the APCI implementation on that laptop doesn't seem to have any positive probe results, with it, so the malo(4) NIC is never seen.

As for the failure which appears to be APM related ... if gosha is able to eventually obtain a successful dump, dmesg with -N and -M will show the specific panic details and gosha will be able to paste them here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gosha View Post
If I understand right, if I will have a machine with 2g of ram, I should have a swap or 4g+ and a /var partition that always has at least as much free available to be safe?
That would be my recommendation.
Quote:
The installation faq doesn't seem to appreciate swap space very much.
FAQ 4.7 says:
Quote:
The 'b' partition of your root drive automatically becomes your system swap partition. Many people follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. This rule is nonsense. On a modern system, that's a LOT of swap, most people prefer that their systems never swap. You don't want your system to ever run out of RAM+swap, but you usually would rather have enough RAM in the system so it doesn't need to swap.
I happen to disagree with the author of that section -- nick@ -- on this. I do not know if he considers it a requirement to be able to use savecore(8). While it is true that you may not need 2X RAM for swap, you need at least 1X RAM to dump memory, pluss some additional MB for control information ... and that space needs to be available (uncommitted) in swap at the time of the panic. So 2X is a fair rule-of-thumb, in my estimation. In your current situation, you had 192MB RAM and 200MB swap -- and, as you saw, you were unable to obtain a core dump. If you had 384MB of swap, and were, say, using 100MB of it for swapped processes, in the event of a panic there would be enough freespace there to dump memory. Depending on your application mix, you might want more.

A typical X user will be swapping regularly with only 192MB of RAM. How much swapping depends on the application set, obviously. e.g.: Firefox consumes 50+MB of RAM, how much "+" depends on use, and if you have gnash the total consumption can go beyond 200-300MB, depending on the amount of flash in the websites you visit.

Last edited by jggimi; 8th August 2008 at 04:24 PM. Reason: clarity
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