Kernel "dead pauses" since 2.6.5-1.332

[Julien Olivier]

On Sun, 2004-04-25 at 03:25, Aleksey Nogin wrote:
> On 23.04.2004 18:03, Josh Boyer wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 10:41, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> > 
> >>Twice now - X11 suddenly stops responding, or is extremely slow in
> >>responding. The mouse works just fine - so it's not a refresh issue, but
> >>the window manager/desktop (gnome) takes forever to respond to clicks.
> >>
> >>Switching to a virtual console is instantaneous - but there is a delay
> >>in log in. But once logged in, the cli is snappy - but the problem
> >>persists in X11.
> > 
> > Yeah, I am seeing pretty much the same thing, but it's not localized to
> > X11.  Some other random things are seeing "pauses", like setfiles.  And
> > I have an ATI Radeon, so at least it isn't a problem with one particular
> > graphics card.
> > 
> > At first I thought the behavior was SELinux related, but it still
> > happens when I boot with SELinux disabled.  Haven't seen anything in any
> > of the logs though.  If I go back a couple of kernels, the problem seems
> > to go away.
> 
> I am seeing something like this too. The way it looks for me is as if 
> the hard drive just stops responding - everything that wants disk access 
> freezes, but everything else keeps working normally. Once in a while the 
> disk would "unfreeze", I would see a lot of disk activity, and then 
> another freeze (for a periods varying from a few seconds to couple of 
> minutes).
> 
> These freezes always start when something very disk-intensive is running 
> (slocate's updatedb, "setfiles check", etc). Quitting Mozilla sometimes 
> helps get rid of them for a while, in other cases only a reboot makes 
> them go away (until they come back a few hours later).
> 
> This is a major blocker, IMHO.

I had a similar problem in both Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1. Then, it
disappeared with FC2, but came back recently, after a yum update
(something like 1 or 2 weeks ago).

-- 
Julien Olivier <julo at altern.org>