[BUG] heavy disk access sometimes freezes 2.5.73-mm[123]

Barry K. Nathan (barryn@pobox.com)
Thu, 3 Jul 2003 02:05:41 -0700


This is going to be a terribly vague bug report, of a bug that I can't
reproduce on demand (at least not yet). I'll see if I can bang on this
over the 4th of July weekend and create a reproducible scenario, but
until then, I want to at least get *something* in writing that other
people can see. So, here goes...

When I run 2.5.73-mm[123] on a Mandrake Cooker system here, it generally
runs fine. However, when I run "urpmi --auto-select" to upgrade the
packages to the latest versions, rpm tends to freeze up during
installation of one of the packages. This did not seem to happen with
2.5.70-mm9, which was the kernel I ran before 2.5.73-mm1.

(It doesn't seem to be happening with 2.5.74 either, although I think
it's really too soon to say for sure.)

ps shows a process (an rpm process, IIRC) stuck in the D state.

The most unusual aspect of this system is that it's using loopback root.
The root filesystem is ReiserFS, contained within a file on a FAT32
partition.

I'll try to make this happen in a more controlled environment soon...

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn@pobox.com>
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