Hi Folken, The do_try_to_free_pages failures are symptoms of a bug in the 2.2.17pre6 kernel that ships with 2.2.
I have a K6/2 233 machine with 64M RAM which displays these errors occasionally. They don't appear to be fatal but could be leaking memory? I also have a 486SLC 33 machine with 8M RAM which displays these errors a lot during installation and package upgrades. Again they're not fatal. Your problems could be related to this bug and running out of swap space. Neither of my machines have done this, the first has 512M of swap and runs X and StarOffice. The second doesn't run X - with 8M of RAM it doesn't run anything big :) You can configure additional swap space using a file. You will need to use dd to create the file and mkswap then swapon to create and activate the swap area. I suggest reading the manpages for these. The alternative is to install a more stable kernel e.g. 2.2.17 final. I haven't done this myself yet. Regards, Neil Darlow. -- 1024D/531F9048 1999-09-11 Neil Darlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Key fingerprint = 359D B8FF 6273 6C32 BEAA 43F9 E579 E24A 531F 9048 On 11/22/00, 6:21:00 PM, Folken Lacour wrote: > I'm a Linux newbie, but I know this should not be > happening. I can't get an uptime > 36 hours -- Linux > just freezes in X. Occassionally, I'm able to switch > over to another VC, where I see > VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for <application> ... > (There are about 10 lines for each application I'm > running). But for the most part, the entire system > freezes & I'm forced to do a *hard* reboot (and let > fsck do its thing). After the reboot, > /var/log/kern.log has a bunch of > VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for <application> ... > last message repeated <x> times > (x varies from 2 to 31).