Re: 2.1.129 Scheduling Issue?

Michael H. Warfield (mhw@wittsend.com)
Sun, 22 Nov 1998 23:15:47 -0500 (EST)


Michael K Vance enscribed thusly:
> Hello all,

> Forgive me, I'm just starting the development kernel journey, so haven't quite
> hashed out yet how a proper bug/anomaly report should be made. I will attempt
> a description of what happenned, though, in the hope that it is helpful.

> I was using my standard workspace--Window Manager, Netscape, XEmacs, PPP,
> rxvt, xscreensaver, some dock applets, etc. I was also (and this would seem to
> be the anomaly) was building glibc-2.0.103 in the background. It reached a
> simple 'mv ...' statement, and froze, and I watched my CPU meter (wmmon)
> slowly climb and climb, till I had about eight load lines. During this time
> all commands basically froze to a snail's pace... some attempts at 'ps', 'su',
> and 'ls', and 'top'. My window manager retained complete responsiveness,
> however. Eventually I was able to get 'top' running, and saw that two
> instances of 'bash' were taking up 46% and 44% or so of the CPU. I killed
> both, but then 'init' simply took over 98% or so of the CPU. Killing my window
> manager (?) seemed to fix all of this.

2.1.127/128/129 have a problem when compiled with SMP disabled that
many of us have called the 127/128 flu. A fix did not make it into 2.1.129
but a fix announced by Linus via E-Mail did make it into Alan Cox's second
patch set to 2.1.129 (2.1.129ac2). His patch level is currently at ac3.

Your choices...

1) Enable SMP (it runs on a single processor and doesn't catch the flu)

-or-

2) Get Alan Cox's patch:
ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/2.1/patch-2.1.129-ac3.gz

-or-

3) Find the E-Mail message Linus sent to the list with the fix.
(Don't - Alan's got other fixes in his patch).

-or-

4) Wait for 2.1.130...

My compile of 2.1.129ac3 UP has now been running for over a day and
a half with no sign of "da flu". Yeah!!!

> Info:

> 2.1.129 clean with SMP commented out
> glibc-2.0.7
> Pentium 233-MMX w/64mb RAM, 80mb swap
> Originally a Red Hat 5.0 distro, but bears little resemblance to that now...
>
> If a config/anything else is helpful, let me know.
>
> m.
>
> --
> "Up above aliens hover making home movies for the folks back home, of all
> these weird creatures who lock up their spirits, drill holes in themselves
> and live for their secrets. They're all uptight." -Thom Yorke, Radiohead

Mike

-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw@WittsEnd.com
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 925-8248   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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