I don't know if this is specifically an intel bug. I sometimes see the same thing occur and I'm using nvidia.
It happened again just now: the PC was doing nothing all night, but when I returned to it and pressed a key to stop the screensaver, X had become unresponsive due to disk thrashing. I could actually see X trying to redraw the screen background pixel by pixel (it finally gave up). The unresponsiveness showed no sign of abating after 20 minutes, but I eventually managed to ssh in. The culprit must have been firefox (1.2GB usage according to atop) because killing it fixed the problem. Oddly around 900 MB of swap was being used even though the top two memory processes were FF and VirtualBox, using only around 2.5 GB out of my 4 GB RAM. The 900 MB swap could have been left over from a swap load test I did 36 hours earlier - but I would have expected the swap to be freed once no longer required sometime in those 36 hours. For reference, I found that the 2.6.28 kernel would always 'lock up' as soon as swap was hit, eg if I tried to run two VM's using 1.5 GB each. So I have been using the 2.6.30 kernel with the patch in http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309#c366. My initial testing showed that the 2.6.30 kernel so far generally works much better when swap is hit (eg by running two or more VMs), and the patch improves things further. So there seem to be several problems: (1) memory leaks in some programs, (2) poor management of swap, (3) poor management of scheduling under heavy disk I/O. ** Bug watch added: Linux Kernel Bug Tracker #12309 http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309 -- High load average, disk read, no apparent reason - 2.6.28-11 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/367377 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
