Re: freezes...

Unfortunately the OOM killer in v2.4 of the Linux Kernel isn't exactly
/intelligent/. Generally it tries to kill off the "least active" or
"lowest priority" process first, and then moves down the line to the
one with the largest consumption of memory at that moment.
Unfortunately, Konq/E, OPIE, and ipkg are  (relatively) heavy in terms
of resource usage (espeically ipkg -- it's a shell script that forks
out to quite a few sub-processes just to function).

I have the same issue when I'm running kdrive X, ion3, minimo, rxvt,
bash, and apt-get. Interestingly enough, if kdrive is killed off with
the OOM, the Jornada's screen seems to "freeze up" instead of cleaning
itself up and returning me to a console.

You might look into trying to reduce the amount of RAM that Konq/E
uses by reducing the existance of varios BDF and TTF fonts on your
disk. From the Konq/E FAQ:

"The startup time of Konq/E is very slow when using Qt/Embedded. Is
there a hidden turbo-boost configure switch to accelerate it to
lightspeed?

A lot of time on startup is spend on parsing the available fonts. To
optimize this make sure Qt/E only uses the .qpf font files for fonts
and no .bdf or .ttf fonts . This will decrease startup time
dramatically and reduce memory usage. See the Qt documentation of
details about .qpf font files and how to generate them."

Also, to reduce the randomness and insanity that the OOM killer is on
an embedded device like the Jornada, you might want to set the
vm.overcommit_memory sysctl to 2. This has the effect of preventing
the Linux kernel from "over allocating" RAM, freaking out when it runs
out, and then using the OOM killer to free up memory by randomly
killing processes. See <http://lwn.net/Articles/104179/> for more
information on this trick. The end result is that instead of the OPIE
main process being killed, whichever process is trying to allocate
more RAM than is available in the system will kill itself since it
won't be able to allocate any more.

Much more graceful on an embedded device, IMHO -- and I'm going to try
out that tweak this week, myself. =o)

On 11/7/06, Michael Blatt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Which makes me think, since we were talking about the amount of RAM on the
> machine:
>
> I have a J720 with 32MB RAM, and, well, OPIE and apps do run out of memory
> on a regular basis.
>
> All it takes is a konq/e with a blank page, an opie-console and ipkg running
> at the same time, usually. What happens then, I reckon, is that the kernel
> decides to kill the qpe/opie main process and the UI freezes completely.
>
> What's the best way of dealing with this, short of pulling the plug and
> battery out?
>
> I can ssh into the box and restart opie almost every time this happens, but
> that is not always practical (and if I had another keyboard nearby I
> wouldn't be using the Jornada at that precise moment, would I?).
>
> I haven't been able to think of a way to get the display and input back to
> the console when qpe/opie dies, which would be the lesser evil.
>
> Anyone with any idea how this could be done, or whether there is an
> alternative?
>
>
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Michael
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>
>
>


-- 
June Tate-Gans
[email protected]
http://www.theonelab.com