Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755819AbXJ2TqU (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:46:20 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754473AbXJ2TmE (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:42:04 -0400 Received: from wolff.to ([66.93.197.194]:52921 "HELO wolff.to" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1754858AbXJ2TmD (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:42:03 -0400 X-Greylist: delayed 2345 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:42:01 EDT Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:55:22 -0500 From: Bruno Wolff III To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Processes spinning forever, apparently in lock_timer_base()? Message-ID: <20071029185522.GB30571@wolff.to> References: <46B10BB7.60900@redhat.com> <20070803113407.0b04d44e.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070804084426.GA20464@kobayashi-maru.wspse.de> <20070809095943.GA7763@kobayashi-maru.wspse.de> <20070809095534.25ae1c42.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1680 Lines: 34 On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 16:58:15 +0100, Hugh Dickins 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 majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/