Re: Processes spinning forever, apparently in lock_timer_base()?

Andrew Morton
2007-09-21T10:35:14Z

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:25:41 +0100 richard kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> > That's all a bit crappy if the wrong races happen and some other task is
> > somehow exceeding the dirty limits each time this task polls them. Seems
> > unlikely that such a condition would persist forever.
> >
> > So the question is, why do we have large amounts of dirty pages for one
> > disk which appear to be sitting there not getting written?
>
> The lockup I'm seeing intermittently occurs when I have 2+ tasks copying
> large files (1Gb+) on sda & a small read-mainly mysql db app running on
> sdb. The lockup seems to happen just after the copies finish -- there
> are lots of dirty pages but nothing left to write them until kupdate
> gets round to it.

Then what happens? The system recovers?