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by ornxka 1998 days ago
Something similar happened to me once - I used faulty ram for about a year (it worked most of the time, and when it didn't, it typically became apparent within a few minutes of booting the system, so it was a minor annoyance at worst). One of the times it didn't work, I noticed all of my programs were being killed by the OOM reaper, even though I had just started the system. After running free in a spare terminal, I realized it was reporting that I had roughly INT_MAX memory in use, and so it was deciding to kill basically everything to try and get back to having a non-negative amount of free memory left. There must have been memory corruption in some kernel data structure somewhere that deals with memory allocation.

I rebooted and it never happened again, but it was pretty funny running free and seeing those ridiculous numbers pop up. I was kind of amazed the rest of the system was even working at all.

1 comments

I can't believe you willingly used faulty RAM for a year. It could have silently corrupted an important file.