On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 16:58:15 +0100, Hugh Dickins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But once I look harder at it, I wonder what would have kept > 2.6.18 to 2.6.23 safe from the same issue: per-cpu deltas from > the global vm stats too low to get synched back to global, yet > adding up to something which misleads balance_dirty_pages into > an indefinite loop e.g. total nr_writeback actually 0, but > appearing more than dirty_thresh in the global approximation.
I have been seeing this problem since Fedora Core 5's 2.6.20-1.2300.fc5 kernel. The last Fedora kernel that didn't have this problem was 2.6.19-1.2288.2.4.fc5, which I am still running on one machine. I have put up vmstat and proc/meminfo data at: http://wolff.to/bruno/vmlog There are a number of iterations of the output and they are mixed together, though the vmstat info was written when a buffer was full, so there are chunks of lines together. This was from a machine running Fedora 7's 2.6.23.1-4.fc7 kernel. The machine is a single processor P3 with 512 MB of memory. There are three hard drives, two of which are used in software raid 1 arrays. I have ext3 file systems mounted noatime. I can provide more details if you need anything else. I can get lockups to happen fairly often. Often lots of firefox activity and/or some other disk heavy task such as yum update will get it to happen. I am not subscribed to LMKL, so please keep me copied on replies. - 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/
