Re: Keys get stuck

Mike Galbraith
2008-03-13T05:42:31Z

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 22:22 +0100, Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 12. März 2008 schrieb Jiri Kosina:
> > On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, David Newall wrote:
> > > > The problem is that under heavy load the auto-repeat problem is real;
> > > > I've seen it as well, and it means that I've started to try to avoid
> > > > "make -j4" since that's a great way to trigger it.
> > >
> > > I'm sure it does suck under heavy load, although I suppose you could
> > > increase the start time. But I wonder if that is the problem this
> > > time? Modern machines are so damned fast they actually take real
> > > effort to load. Actually, "make -j4" doesn't sound particularly heavy.
> > > There's huge disk i/o in a make. Plenty of scheduling opportunities.
> > > Obviously I only know what everybody else here knows; but with so many
> > > recent posts suggesting a scheduling fault has been introduced, I'm
> > > expecting it to be that.
> >
> > The problem became much more apparent during early -rc phase of 2.6.25
> > for those people that have CONFIG_GROUP_SCHED turned on. This clearly
> > shows that X are somehow unhappy with how kernel schedules them, but I
> > don't have idea how autorepeat is implemented inside X and what could be
> > the problem right now.
>
> Just for the record, this problem started with openSUSE 10.2 for me, that's
> a 2.6.18 thingy. I'm a heavy xterm user, where the autorepeat gets a life
> of its own _occasionally_. I'm able to stop it by triggering a autorepeat
> manually (typical antidot reaction).

I've seen these key repeats for years. All I ever had to do was to make
X run heavily enough in the presence of another (hefty) load that it
hits the expired array and thereby takes a serious latency hit. I
always considered key repeats under load to be X's quaint way of saying
"HEEEEELP MEEEE" ;-)

-Mike