[Discuss] I need a recommendation for a Linux-compatible high-endPCbuilder

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2018-01-29 19:27-0800 Cy Schubert wrote:

> Really? Where did you learn this [my knowlege concerning special
memory for Linux]?

It is who (as in "who you know") rather than where.  Just to name drop
a bit, in this case, my collaborator for the timephem project is David
Howells who happens also to be a Linux kernel developer employed by
RedHat.  So when my Linux system developed those symptoms (acting like
there was a memory leak with everything being executed from SWAP, but
top and free showed plenty of free memory left in RAM), I quickly went
to David with this peculiar problem even though it had nothing to do
with our joint project.  He and his kernel colleagues had never heard
of such a problem with the Linux kernel, but he immediately zeroed in
on the possibility of a Linux special memory leak, told me what to
look up in /sys/kernel to attempt to verify the issue, and agreed what
I found there was absolutely wrong with one kind of special memory
being much too large.  From then on, we monitored the amount of that
particular kind of special memory starting from boot and quickly
proved that there was a slow but relentless leak occurring for it.
Unfortunately, (since I got the impression there was some high-power
Linux kernel help ready to tackle the issue) nothing more could be
done to debug the problem since nobody could find a way to reproduce
the symptoms my system was showing.  But that was an old kernel and
moving to the next kernel fixed the issue for me so we all let it
slide.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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