Re: 2.4.3 freeze under heavy writing + open rxvt

John Jasen (jjasen1@umbc.edu)
Tue, 3 Apr 2001 23:02:51 -0400


On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Simon Kirby wrote:

> Three times now I've had 2.4.3 freeze on my dual CPU box while doing a
> "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k" (a drive to be RMA'd :)). I got
> bored and opened an rxvt, and as the machine was swapping in (I assume),
> everything froze. The mouse still moved for about 5 seconds before the
> freeze, and the window was visible as it was attempting to start tcsh.
>
> I'm guessing that what's happening is something is waiting on a lock and
> blocking interrupts (?) for five seconds while it is swapping in, and the
> NMI lockup detector is kicking in and really breaking it.

I've noticed the same thing. I was doing a rather sadistic test, checking
a memory chip.

one window: make -j in 2.4.2 src; and in another, dd if=/dev/hda
of=/dev/null bs=4096k.

The third window was running top, and froze. A fourth window wouldn't get
past login:

--
-- John E. Jasen (jjasen1@umbc.edu)
-- In theory, theory and practise are the same. In practise, they aren't.

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