Ingo, I've accidentally discovered a problem with -v18.
Some time ago, I wrote a small program to prevent my laptop from entering low-power mode, and noticed that after upgrading my laptop's kernel from 2.4.20.9+cfs-v6 to 2.4.20.14+cfs-v18, it completely freezes if I run this program. The program is trivial, it just sets its prio to nice +20 and forks a busy loop. I've added the ability to stop the loop after a user-definable number of iterations, and I can confirm that it unfreezes when the loop ends. I'm not even root when I run it. Everything freezes, including the frame-buffer. It's not 100% reproducible, I would say 90% only. Sometimes it requires a few seconds before freezing. It *seems* to me that running another task in parallel (such as vmstat) increases its chances to freeze. It seems like nicing to +19 does not cause any trouble. I've tried it on my dual athlon, and with 1 process I see occasional pauses of 1 or 2 seconds, and with 2 processes, I see fairly larger pauses. Here's the trivial program. Probably you'll find an obvious bug. Regards, Willy --- /* * cfs-freeze.c * Fork a busy loop running with idle prio. This often results * in complete freezes with CFS-v18. * * $ gcc -O2 -s -o cfs-freeze cfs-freeze.c * $ ./cfs-freeze */ #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sched.h> #include <sys/time.h> #include <sys/resource.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { struct sched_param sch; long long i; if (argc > 1) i = atoll(argv[1]); if (i <= 0) i = 4 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000ULL; sch.sched_priority = 0; sched_setscheduler(0, SCHED_OTHER, &sch); setpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, 0, 20); if (fork() == 0) while (i--); return 0; } --- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/