Re: Houston, I think we have a problem

Martin J. Bligh
2003-04-27T17:17:22Z

>> > To reproduce this 100% of the time, simply compile virgin 2.5.68
>> > up/preempt, reduce your ram to 128mb, and using gcc-2.95.3 as to not
>> > overload the vm, run a make -j30 bzImage in an ext3 partition on a
>> > P3/500 single ide disk box. No, you don't really need to meet all of
>> > those restrictions... you'll see the problem on a big hairy chested
>> > box as well, just not as bad as I see it on my little box. The first
>> > symptom of the problem you will notice is a complete lack of swap
>> > activity along with highly improbable quantities of unused ram were
>> > all those hungry cc1's getting regular CPU feedings.
>>
>> Yes, that's why I don't use ext3 ;-) It's known broken, akpm is fixing
>> it.
>
> I'm not at all convinced (must say I wouldn't mind at _all_ being
> convinced) that it's ext3... that just _seems_ to be worst easily
> reproducible case for some un-(expletive deleted)-known reason.

Well, that's easy to test. Mount the fs as ext2, and see if it goes away.

If it's your rootfs, it's too stupid to sniff your fstab at r/w remount
time (or give you the correct info from "mount", so be careful), so you
have to append rootfstype=ext2 to the kernel command line.

M.