Writes to USB disk fill up RAM

[sixtyfive]

Hi all!

First off, thank you for your great work on Gargoyle, I feel like I've finally "arrived" at "home" on my home router wrt to the OS.

Unfortunately, after having setup Gargoyle on our new WNDR3800, there came to be a bit of a problem: whenever someone copied files onto the attached USB drive, at some point the router would mysteriously reboot and it turned out that RAM would mysteriously fill up by as much as was the size of the files copied onto the USB drive. Here's proof:

Code: Select all

jrs@DerGargoyle:/mnt$ date ; free ; dd if=/dev/zero of=file bs=1M count=20 ; free ; rm file ; free ; date
Sat Jun 20 23:42:02 CEST 2015
             total         used         free       shared      buffers
Mem:        126416        45120        81296            0         5892
-/+ buffers:              39228        87188
Swap:      2097148            0      2097148
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
             total         used         free       shared      buffers
Mem:        126416        65876        60540            0         5892
-/+ buffers:              59984        66432
Swap:      2097148            0      2097148
             total         used         free       shared      buffers
Mem:        126416        45020        81396            0         5900
-/+ buffers:              39120        87296
Swap:      2097148            0      2097148
Sat Jun 20 23:42:25 CEST 2015

At this point I have to admit, I'm at the end of my wits and am sincerely hoping someone here might have an idea as to how I could get to the bottom of this. Any takers?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Lantis]

I can tell you that my external is formatted as NTFS and it works fine with my WNDR3800 under "normal" use.
However if I had 3 users try to copy files to it at once it froze and eventually rebooted.

[sixtyfive]

Hey Lantis, thank you for the reply!

In my attempt at a somewhat humorous account of what I did so far to investigate this, I might have overcomplicated things.

The facts right now are:

• data partition formatted as ext4
• CIFS/NFS/FTP/DLNA disabled
• check how much ram is free - for example 80MB
• mount /dev/sda2 /mnt && dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/testfile bs=1M count=20 # Or any other method of putting a file there...
• check how much ram is free - only 60MB free now

So it has nothing to do with traffic of any sort...

Edit:

Since noone had any more comments on this, can I assume it's not a problem that has been observed yet?

Could someone, one of the developers perhaps, give me some hints as to how this could be debugged? As the problem occurs when using low-level tools like dd, it hais obviously nothing to do with userspace memory management, but I've no idea how to figure it out if it's a kernelspace problem...

Any help at all would be welcome!!

Final edit:

After playing around with this issue some more, I ended up compiling OpenWRT for myself and have had no trouble since. I'd like to advise anybody else for whom not all of Gargoyle works out-of-the-box to also switch to OpenWRT or DD-WRT. Since development on Gargoyle seems to at least have stagnated and these forums seem to be in a semi-hibernating status as well, that's unfortunately the best solution.