On Oct 23 19:00:13, s...@spacehopper.org wrote:
> Can you go into any more detail on "process will get killed" or "crashed"?
> Core dumps, backtraces, messages on console/logs/dmesg?
Console just says 'Killed', as in
$ pstree
Killed
There is no core dump, nothing in dmesg, nothing in logs
that I could find.
But:
> Does the swap partition sd0b actually exist,
> or are you by any chance running these machines swapless?
Indeed, I am running without swap.
> Including having swap configured as sd0b
> but the partition being non-existant?
I don't know what you mean by "configured"
if the partition does not exist. Do you mean
a line in fstab? No, I don't have that either.
> I've seen this seemingly random unstable behavior
> on our RockPI 4a SBCs when no swap is configured.
I can confirm that after adding a 1GB swap partition,
these random killings have completely disappeared.
Thank you! (I will also try on the RPI4.)
> Just to be clear - the lack of a swap partition
> causes this behaviour even when plenty of physical RAM is available.
Yes, that seems to be my case too.
I don't understand it though:
$ swapctl -l
Device 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Priority
/dev/sd0b 2104516 0 2104516 0% 0
$ swapctl -s
total: 2104516 512-blocks allocated, 0 used, 2104516 available
The swap never gets used. For example, I just did full
kernel build, and swapctl -s still says zero.
If there is enough RAM to not have to swap,
why would a missing swap get processes killed
(if that was actualy the root cause of course)?
> In our case, creating a swap parition of a mere 32 MB
> mitigated the issue, even though it wasn't touched doing
> a kernel compile with 4 Gb of physical RAM.
I will try with a very small swap partition just to confirm;
in fact, the installer has offered to create a ~32MB swap
on a 2GB card before and I foolishly did not use it,
thinking I will not need swap anyway.
Is this known? Or is there another reason the installer
wants to create e.g. a 32 MB swap on a machine with 1GB RAM
and a few GB of disk?
There is something else going on on the swap partition,
even of not used for lack of physical ram: for example,
now that I run with the swap partition, I can remove it
with swapctl -d, but cannot remove it from the disklabel
because disklabel: DIOCWDINFO: Device busy.
Jan
