[Lxc-users] Kernel panics, out of RAM, provisioning lxc guests and host

[Dan Kegel]

This is more a newbie note to self than anything else.

Twice now, I've gotten a kernel panic while using lxc on precise 12.04.1
inside virtualbox.  It seems to happen when there's lots of disk I/O going
on - probably I'm running out of memory, or something.
The workload is "build large closed-source package and run its unit tests".
The first time I ran out of memory, I switched the overlay directory
to be a real directory
(well, in virtualbox) instead of in tmpfs, and that helped; I get a lot further.
Oddly, in the outer vm, although df reports there is disk space, I wasn't
able to write to disk; it reported 'out of space'.

The kernel panic had 'forget_original_parent' in it, I think, and
a little googling makes me think the kernel panic itself is not
very informative.

Time to overprovision!  I'm going to give the poor virtualbox client
an extra gigabyte of RAM and see if that helps.