Re: 2.6.38.x: system hangs, iowait ~75, no resource-hogs, no logs

[Thomas Sattler <tsattler@gmx.de>]

On 04/08/11 01:14, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> Try the patch found in "Linux 2.6.38 freeze because of 
> sound/core/pcm_lib.c commit"

I applied https://lkml.org/lkml/diff/2011/4/1/69/1 but that
did not (completely?) solve my problem:

While running firefox (>50 open Tabs), khugepaged suddenly
run at 99.99% IO (according to 'iotop'). X became unusable
within seconds, but the system itself was still running.

I was able to switch to tty1 where everything was quite
normal, except khugepaged beeing constantly above 90%.
Switching back to X showed a frozen windowmanager with
empty windows. Back to tty1 I was able to kill X and
start a new X session, which behaved as usual.

khugepaged kept the system busy for another 10min so I
rebooted the machine. (This time there was no problem
running 'pkill' and 'iotop' several times.)

My current kernel is configured like this:

$ zgrep HUGE /proc/config.gz
CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE=y
CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_ALWAYS=y
# CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE is not set
# CONFIG_HUGETLBFS is not set
# CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE is not set


** Please CC: me, as I'm not on the list. **

Thomas