Memory management problem?

[Chris Morrow]

I'm running into a problem where the linux kernel is running
out of memory and starts killing processes in an attempt to
recover. The environment is as follows.

A CDB89712 based system with 16 Meg. sdram and 16 meg CFI flash.
Linux-2.4.19-rmk1 with linux-2.4.19-pre10-shared-zlib patch.

First, on another system I create a number of files with random
contents and calculate their md5sums as follows;

#!/bin/sh

rm randFile*

numFiles=40
blockSize=1024
blocksPerFile=100

proc createFiles () {
	numFiles=$1
	blockSize=$2
	blockPerFile=$3
	fileSize=$(($blocksPerFile * $blockSize))
	while [ $numFiles -gt 0 ]; do
     		echo "creating file $numFiles"
     		dd if=/dev/urandom of=randFile.$numFiles \
			bs=$blockSize count=$blocksPerFile
     		let $((numFiles--))
		done
}

createFiles 40 1024 100

tar cf rand.tar randFile*
md5sum randFile* > rand-md5sum

Next, run the following on the test machine.

#!/bin/sh

while true; do
	date
	tar -xvf /home/yotta/crm/junk/jffs2test/rand.tar
	/home/yotta/crm/junk/jffs2test/verify.sh
done


After about 3 iterations, the kernel will start killing
processes.

There are some "deflateInit failed" warning messages during
the run.

Keeping the total size of the files to about 4 meg but changing
the size of the individual files, I have seen the memory
problem.

Anybody got any ideas?

-- 
Chris Morrow	YottaYotta Inc. email: cmorrow at yottayotta.com
phone: (780) 989 6814 web:	http:  //www.yottayotta.com