Linux

Hi all,

I was compiling my glibc 2.6.1 source files on a new kernel 2.66.22.6 and it seems that i am running into issues with the Virtual Memory. It displays the error message:

virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory‏

I saw an article on how to adjust the parameters but i can't make sense of the numbers and what they mean and nor does the article describe them like vm.dbflush value etc.

Anyone give an easy view of this?

your help would be much appreciated.

Mani

Which Linux?

Hi,

Its called JDS Linux from Sun Microsystems, not sure of you heard of it. It was quite old and i wanted to install Firefox, which said my glibc was out of date. looking at the pre-reqs i needed to update a lot of things of and after that was a mutexlock error while compiling glibc and that led me to update the Kernel to 2.6.22.6 now i am getting this VM error.

Any ideas? still reading on the net for VM settings but so far it seems like a black art.

Mani

Might also be useful tok now what's eating all the memory, try 'ps aux | less'.

Indeed, I would suggest identifying what is first using most of your memory.

Something like a free -m, first off will give the general idea of how much memory you already are working with while doing a top -c and shift + m before evening running the install will see specifically what is eating most of your memory up.

From there you can disable the processes that are eating up most of the memory. If there is a redundant process or something that is spawning more children than normal you can run:

ps aux | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -g

or

ps aux | awk '{print $11}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -g

If you could shoot me the results, I can take a look for ya, but they're pretty obvious.

One thing I must add, that using older distributions, especially ones that seem to have spurious support is never a good idea. Sun ditched the Java Desktop a while back and I think that you may have encountered what will be one of many issues you might face.