At first I thought that the VM in 2.4.10-acX (I've tried ac3 and ac7) was
a big improvement over vanilla 2.4.9 (my previous kernel). But after
playing around with different versions and patches, and actually running
the same kernel for a day or more I ran into severe problems.
The problem can be triggered by a number of things, ususally involving
semi-heavy disk activitity (kernel recompile, apt-get installs...). It
seems to only happen after the system has been up for a while (10+
hours).
Suddenly the CPU usage jumps to 100%, and the load avarage to 10 or
more. The system becomes completely unresponsive, even the mouse pointer
freezes for long periods of time. It looks like most of the CPU time is
spent in kswapd, and some in kupdated. The harddisk LED shows almost no
activity.
I haven't verified (yet) that this is -acX only, but vanilla 2.4.9 did not
have this problem.
System is a Duron on KT133 chipset, 256M RAM, 300M swap, reiserfs.
/cyr
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On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Erik Gustavsson wrote:
> At first I thought that the VM in 2.4.10-acX (I've tried ac3 and ac7) was
> a big improvement over vanilla 2.4.9 (my previous kernel). But after
> playing around with different versions and patches, and actually running
> the same kernel for a day or more I ran into severe problems.
I've already put out a patch which tries to fix this problem,
once we've established that it indeed works as advertised and
doesn't have bad side effects, I'll ask Alan to integrate it:
http://www.surriel.com/patches/2.4/2.4.10-ac9-eatcache
The patch applies cleanly to at least 2.4.10-ac9 and -ac10,
maybe a few others too.
It would be nice to know if this patch fixes the problems for
you, if it does there's another reason to ask Alan to integrate
it ... if it doesn't I'll try to make it work before sending
the thing to Alan.
regards,
Rik
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I have now been running 2.4.10-ac10 with the "eatcache" patch applied,
doing near constant md5sums of huge files and kernel recompiles for
12 hours. Very smooth, and much lower swap usage than before. No sign of
the problems I had.
Very nice indeed!
/cyr
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Lister: What d'you think it is?
Cat: An orange whirly thing in space!