Syzkaller Issue
Hi all,
I’m running syzkaller for kernel fuzzing on a very constrained VM (1 GB RAM) and hitting a recurring issue after some iterations:
- Syzkaller starts fine
- My script automatically starts the next iteration after one finishes
- After running for a while, I start getting:
- “fork not possible”
- “cannot allocate memory”
- Eventually fuzzing stalls
Current setup:
- procs=1
- low-memory VM (1GB)
- repeated automated iterations
- considering target_reboot and swap, not fully tuned yet
My suspicion is one of:
- syz-executor processes accumulating
- kernel slab/kmalloc growth from fuzzing
- fork failing due to Linux overcommit / no swap
- my iteration loop not cleaning up enough between runs
Questions:
- Has anyone run syzkaller reliably on very low memory?
- What tuning helped most? (swap, drop_caches, target_reboot, overcommit settings, smaller corpus, disabling coverage, etc.)
- Is periodic reboot normal for long-running syzkaller on small VMs?
- Any way to detect whether this is executor leakage vs kernel memory pressure?
I’ve seen fork failures can happen under memory pressure on Linux :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}, but wondering what syzkaller-specific fixes people use.
Would appreciate configs, scripts, or debugging ideas.