Swapfile problem in 6? (was: 6.0: during kernel compilation, 'kernel linking' freezes PC)

[Rob]

--- Rob <spamrefuse at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have upgraded a Pentium-1 PC from 5 to 6-Stable,
> which went smoothly.
> 
> Now I'm running 6 with GENERIC kernel, and I want
> to compile a new kernel. When I start a new kernel
> compilation, this process *always* freezes the PC
> (no crash) when reaching the point of "linking
> kernel"; this is 100 percent reproducible!!
> 
> Then all communication with the PC is frozen;
> no serial port response, no ssh response etc.
> However, I can ping the PC.....
> 
> Only power off/on brings the PC back to live.
> 
> Any idea how I can further investigate.
> /var/log/messages has no special information while
> the freezing occurred.
> 
> The output of 'dmesg' of this PC is here:
>  http://surfion.snu.ac.kr/~lahaye/dmesg

Problem kind of solved:

As this PC has only 32 MB Ram, I add a swapfile.
However, when I compile the new kernel without the
swapfile, all goes well.

Since the freeze is very reproducible with the
swapfile (always at the 'kernel linking' stage),
and immediately disappears when I do not use the
swapfile, I think there's something wrong with
using swapfile in 6.0. Is it?

I do this:

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024k count=128
 chmod 0600 /swapfile
 mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /swapfile -u 0
 swapon /dev/md0

Is this OK?

Rob.



		
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