I had a similar situation of freezing system but I had errors on cpu stalls. the drives were 2/20T raids using adaptec 5805 cards. Did similarly - swapping mb, cpu, mem, psu - nothing worked. Switched from btrfs to xfs. Stayed up but stalled. Then I found a post about not using cfq on 5805 drive. Switched to noop and everything works. No hair left. On Oct 19, 2014 12:12 PM, "David A. De Graaf" <d...@datix.us> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 02:19:55PM -0400, David A. De Graaf wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 04:01:30AM +0930, Tim wrote: > > > Allegedly, on or about 02 October 2014, Chris Murphy sent: > > > > Cables are often the source of weird problems. Specifically it's the > > > > connectors that are flakey, not the cable portion itself. > > > > > > Though, if you savagely bend SATA leads, the way some of them are > > > supplied in a flattened up zig-zag style, with a rubber band around > > > them, you can mess up the data transmission. > > > > > > > Some quick feedback: It's now apparent that the cables or SATA > > sockets have nothing to do with my problem. The finger of guilt > > now seems to point to the RAM sticks. However, experiments are > > slow. More later. > > After weeks of experimentation it's clear that my machine crashes have > nothing to do with the SATA connections or the harddrives. > They are caused by a too-small swap space! > > Zero is OK; large is OK; but small is NG. > > For reasons I can't recall, the system is set up with only a 2 GB swap > partition, and for a long while it had a single 4 GB RAM memory stick. > This was OK. > > Then I added a second 4 GB memory stick, identical to the first. > With 8 GB RAM and 2 GB swap the system crashed - froze - after a > random few hours. > > This was maddening. Not knowing the real cause, I bought a different > motherboard, changed power supply, tried different SATA and ATA > harddrive > connections, changed the SATA cable, removed the extra data drive, > removed the ATA CD drive, used one or the other RAM stick, > disconnected > everything and ran with only a Live F20 Xfce USB stick. I ran > memtest86 > for days without error. The only thing that worked was to revert to > only a single memory stick - 4 GB. Either stick was OK. > > I put everything back together, using an ATA/SATA converter for the > 350 GB primary disk, the SATA 1TB data harddrive, and the ATA CD. > > Then I noticed the size of the swap partition was 2 GB and, having > nothing else to try, added an 8 GB swap file. > > Eureka! It ran. > > I have a matrix of test cases which I won't bore you with. > They can be summarized as follows: > 1 - with 4 GB RAM, either 0 or 2 GB swap space is OK. > 2 - with 8 GB RAM, 0 swap space is OK. > 3 - with 8 GB RAM, 2 GB swap space will reliably freeze the system > 4 - with 8 GB RAM, 4 GB swap file is OK. > 5 - with 8 GB RAM, 2 GB swap partition + 8 GB swap file is OK, > even if the priority of the smaller one is forced higher. > > At no time during these experiments was swap space actually used > according to the gkrellm display; the RAM usage remained well > below what was available. > > This is clearly a bug. No rational design would work like this. > Is it a kernel bug? Some other component? > Which one gets the Bugzilla? > > -- > David A. De Graaf DATIX, Inc. Hendersonville, NC > d...@datix.us www.datix.us > > > "Documentation written in "jargon" may as well not have been written." > - Mike Watson > -- > users mailing list > users@lists.fedoraproject.org > To unsubscribe or change subscription options: > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users > Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct > Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org >
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