low-memory testing

[Albert Cahalan]

On 10/28/07, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> Albert, can you please see that there are proper trac entries fro any
> leaking applications?

I made one, #4471, for the activity I am aware of.

I'm concerned about worse things, like data corruption.
Leaks and mere crashes are nothing in comparison.
Running out of memory makes allocations fail. When
that happens...

Does JFFS2 corrupt itself? Reiserfs and ext3 have both
suffered from this problem.

Does the journal corrupt itself? I think it does, though I
certainly don't have decent proof yet.

Does a driver, in kernel or X, start a DMA to the wrong
location in memory? (address 0, a previous allocation
that has since been freed, or a clean page that was never
locked down and just got discarded by memory pressure)

BTW, there is also a need for power-loss testing. Do we
get corruption if we interrupt etoys/squeak or the journal
at a bad moment? Power loss will certainly happen.
This could use an automated test rig.