Arch Linux

tillmann

Member

Registered: 2010-01-21

Posts: 4

X invoked oom-killer, but free memory available

Hello!

Following situation:
1G RAM, 256M swap space
VirtualBox (virtualbox-sun from AUR) running Windows 7 with 448M RAM.

When running like this, X invokes regularly some oom-killer-thing and i see
applications or tray icons vanishing randomly from my desktop.
dmesg output is then always similar to the following:

X invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x0, order=0, oom_adj=0
Pid: 4037, comm: X Not tainted 2.6.32-ARCH #1
Call Trace:
 [<c10b15e9>] ? T.484+0x99/0x260
 [<c10b188c>] ? __out_of_memory+0xdc/0x140
 [<c10b19e0>] ? pagefault_out_of_memory+0x40/0x80
 [<c1025db9>] ? do_page_fault+0x329/0x330
 [<c10f1d86>] ? sys_ioctl+0x76/0x90
 [<c1025a90>] ? do_page_fault+0x0/0x330
 [<c12b9a23>] ? error_code+0x73/0x78
Mem-Info:
DMA per-cpu:
CPU    0: hi:    0, btch:   1 usd:   0
CPU    1: hi:    0, btch:   1 usd:   0
Normal per-cpu:
CPU    0: hi:  186, btch:  31 usd: 168
CPU    1: hi:  186, btch:  31 usd: 129
HighMem per-cpu:
CPU    0: hi:   42, btch:   7 usd:  41
CPU    1: hi:   42, btch:   7 usd:  24
active_anon:63301 inactive_anon:69099 isolated_anon:0
 active_file:41198 inactive_file:44639 isolated_file:32
 unevictable:13351 dirty:15199 writeback:5431 unstable:0
 free:2959 slab_reclaimable:2594 slab_unreclaimable:3318
 mapped:20037 shmem:8707 pagetables:600 bounce:0

  ... many numbers, if information here i'll post on request ...

96089 total pagecache pages
1482 pages in swap cache
Swap cache stats: add 42449, delete 40967, find 3741/4447
Free swap  = 208852kB
Total swap = 265064kB
260016 pages RAM
32690 pages HighMem
15329 pages reserved
188174 pages shared
71960 pages non-shared
Out of memory: kill process 4442 (openbox) score 38511 or a child
Killed process 27658 (midori)

What i'm puzzled about now is the line Free swap  = 208852kB.
Also htop or free do not make the impression that there is no free memory any more.

It's not, that the rest of my system uses much memory, after boot i have a memory
usage of ~90M (according to htop) and other applications don't use much memory (gedit,
evince, thunar and maybe quodlibet are running and victims of that killer-guy)

Also, it's always X that invokes this oom-killer. So i have no idea if it's a X-issue, a VirtualBox-issue,
a Kernel-issue or whatever. Maybe i'm getting something wrong on this whole free-memory-topic
with all the virtual and shared and cached confusion (at least to me) but
that problem just never happened before.

So, can anyone tell me why this is happening and if i can somehow disable this killer or tell the kernel
to use swap memory (or is it using swap?)

Greetings

donpicoro

Member

Registered: 2009-04-10

Posts: 42

Re: X invoked oom-killer, but free memory available

Same problem here while running some data analysis.
The programs use to run smoothly. Off course the system was busy, but it worked !!!!

I guess this is a kernel issue? The curious thing is that X has nothing to do, except for the fact that the terminal were I run the analysis is an xterm !

Any ideas? Any help would be VERY appreciated !!!

loonyphoenix

Member

From: Belarus

Registered: 2010-01-29

Posts: 19

Re: X invoked oom-killer, but free memory available

I think this is related:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14933

And also this discussion:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/14/151

donpicoro

Member

Registered: 2009-04-10

Posts: 42

Re: X invoked oom-killer, but free memory available

Well,
maybe it was solved now with the new kernel (2.6.32.7-1) or maybe the resources cut I made to my programs is working. But so far I can run smoothly my analysis program. Let's see what happens when I go for the big prize again!

Thanks your your help. I checked those sites you mentioned and they helped me understood what was going on

EDIT:typo

Last edited by donpicoro (2010-02-01 22:28:14)

rapkasta

Member

Registered: 2009-10-19

Posts: 9

Re: X invoked oom-killer, but free memory available

Still have this problem on my 2.6.32.7-1 kernel, all IDEs I that use written on Java and X always invoke oom-killer:
>Feb  9 20:47:37 acerAspire kernel: X invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x0, order=0, oom_adj=0
but there are ~250Mb of free memory all time...on my another computer with _256Mb_ memory and older kernel (2.6.30 may be) i haven't got this issue