Re: Disk-I/O and kupdated@99.9% system (2.4.18-pre9)

[Florian Hars <hars@bik-gmbh.de>]

Heinz Diehl wrote:
> Downgrade to 2.4.18-pre8 and use Michael Cohen's patch from
> "ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mjc/linux-2.4/",

That doesn't help. I tried 2.4.16 with Debian modifications, said 
kernel patched to 2.4.18-pre9, stock 2.4.17, stock 2.4.18-pre9 and
2.4.18-pre8-mjc with preempt and lockbreak, and all behave alike.

On a plain ext2-filesystem on a primary partition I get (with -mjc):

During the sync the system is extremly sluggish, and once during my
tests it froze completely (it did still return pings with a normal
speed) so that I had to press reset.

The same operations on a slower computer running 2.2.20 are consideraby
faster:

$ time tar -xzf linux-2.4.17.tar.gz; time sync

real    0m7.716s
user    0m5.430s
sys     0m2.110s

real    0m6.332s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.120s
 
> Latency in stock 2.4.17/18-pre kernels is well known :\

this looks like more than a latency issue :-(.

Yours, Florian Hars.