Now at Ubuntu VERSION="14.04.1 LTS, Trusty Tahr" seems that the one-and-only x86 kernel offered is with PAE, so I cannot easily demonstrate the difference between PAE and non-PAE kernels. With the PAE kernel, my machine produces an OOM crash with the test command bash -c 'n=0; while [ $n -lt 33000 ]; do sleep 600 & ((n=n+1)); ((m=n%500)); if [ $m -lt 1 ]; then echo -n "$n - "; date; free -l; sleep 1; fi; done' My conjecture is that all Linux machines will produce an OOM, regardless of the amount of RAM memory installed. Your challenge is to prove me wrong: find any one machine that survives the above command without an OOM condition. (Obviously the bug, and thus the challenge, is for Linux machines with x86 CPUs and PAE kernels; but is for any distros, not just Ubuntu.) Should you succeed, you will have helped to better understand this bug and so contribute to finding a solution; I also offer the prize of a carton of beer to the first finder; and having knocked me off my soapbox, you will be allowed to feel smug and superior forever. Should you fail the challenge and have your machine reproduce an OOM crash, I urge you to complain to your Linux distributor or to the kernel people. (Seems that bugs are left unfixed for years if only a few people complain, to the point where Ubuntu abandoned the "working version" non-PAE kernel.) --- Maybe a workaround is to upgrade to 64-bit Linux with amd64 kernel. However... that is just a crude workaround without any guarantee of correctness, until some understanding of this bug: the kernel code is common between 32- and 64-bit. --- Long and boring details below. Cheers, Paul Paul Szabo