On a related topic

[stewart at oec.com (Stewart Allen)]

On Wed, 28 Sep 1994, Dan Demus wrote:

> 	I have a 1GB drive!  I have the whole thing setup as one EXT2
> fs.  It works great, no problems yet.  Except I was trying to unpack a
> very large tarfile onto it (I`m not sure how big of a tarfile), and I
> crashed Linux.  [I really need UUCP email at home] I suspect that this
> crash was due to the size of the tarfile and not the hard drive.  I
> was probably running out of swap space.  I have not tried to reproduce
> the problem yet.

 I've had experience with tar badly crashing Linux in a consistent and re-
 producible way. In an attempt snapshot pieces of a working system, I booted
 the system and mounted an extra drive onto /mnt. Then I issued a command like

   (cd /; tar cf - usr bin etc dev vmlinuz) | (cd /mnt; tar xvf -)

 After chugging merrily through the entire list of files, it got to
 /vmlinuz and quietly/completely died. I tried it again twice with the
 same results; this seems like fairly heinous behaviour from tar. I'm not
 sure if it was the cumulative size of the tar, /vmlinuz, or what, but it
 definately (as reported by "tar xvf") got to the end first.

 The system was 1.0.9 on a 486DX/2-66 w/16MB RAM, 32MB Swap, 2x1Gb SCSI disk.

 -- -  Stewart Allen * stewart at oec.com * 617.562.5826 * FAX 617.562.0038  - -- 
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