[BusyBox] Ash memory question/problem

Jeff Angielski jeff at theptrgroup.com
Thu Dec 18 02:36:10 UTC 2003


This problem was fixed by moving to a newer kernel (kernel.org 2.4.22
kernel with kernel.org linuxppc-2.4.22.patch), just as Robin Gilks had
suggested.  Thanks to all for the comments and help.

FWIW, I am using a BSE ipEngine which has an MPC823 on it.

Thanks,
Jeff

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 15:27, Robin Gilks wrote:
> Jeff Angielski wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 18:26, David Meggy wrote:
> > 
> >>Hi Jeff
> >>
> >>You haven't narrowed your problem down very well at all.  The increase
> >>use of memory could be from any process in the system, or from the
> >>kernel.  It is hard to blame busybox, when you don't check the memory
> >>use of the busybox process.  You can use basic tools like ps or top to
> >>do this.  Or if you are on a really small embedded system, you can take
> >>a look at the busybox process directly by running cat on /proc/#/status,
> >>where # is the process number of busybox.
> >>
> >>David
> > 
> > 
> > I was not really blaming Busybox for the problem.  I am just trying to
> > find out if anybody has seen this problem with the DENX ELDK 2.1 root
> > filesystem and Busybox.
> > 
> > I agree that it could be any number of things causing the memory leak. 
> > I just thought it was wierd that with very little running (famous last
> > words!), "cat /proc/meminfo" shows a 4k loss.  If I put the cat in a
> > loop, it shows a 4k loss each iteration until we hit the low water mark
> > for the low mem region.  "free" as well as other commands do the same
> > thing.
> > 
> > Incidentally, I am using a 2.4.18 kernel. 
> > 
> > I also asked since somebody else had reported similiar findings but I
> > saw no resolution to the problem:
> > 
> > http://www.busybox.net/lists/busybox/2003-October/009472.html
> > 
> 
> When we had similar symtoms, it turned out to be a bug in the handling 
> of the shared memory interface between our mpc8xx CPU and its CPM comms 
> risc. This kernel issue was fixed in 2.4.22 as I recall.
> 
> You don't mention what target you are using so this information may not 
> be relevant :-(( We narrowed it down when we found that any activity, 
> whether busybox related or not caused 4k to disappear every time!!
> 




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