Re: [PROBLEM] Machine Freezes while Running Crossover Office

[Pekka Enberg <penberg@gmail.com>]

Hi Linus,

On Sat, 28 May 2005, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> > I did a binary search and found out that 2.6.10-bk10 introduced this
> > bug. The kernel includes Linus' changes for pipes to use circular buffers.
> > A oprofile run shows that kernel is spending lots of time in poll_pipe. I
> > also have Alt-Sysrq-P traces that indicate to the same direction. I have
> > included vmstat, Alt-SysRq-P, and oprofile traces in this mail (see below
> > for section X.).

On 5/29/05, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> Can you try to see if you can get an "strace" snippet of X (or the window
> manager) when this happens, since it seems to reproducible by you..
> 
> Also, I actually find it very surprising that you see X doing anything
> _at_all_ with a pipe, since all the X connections should be just normal
> sockets. There are no pipes involved anywhere afaik.
> 
> Your description sounds exactly like X is busy processing some slow
> operation (or possibly the window manager, but I think virtual console
> switches happen without the WM being involved). The most common such slow
> operation is a new font being generated, but I don't see why that would
> have anything to do with pipes either...

Looking at output of lsof, I can see that Crossover is using pipes. I
am not very familiar with wine internals but there seems to be two
processes, wine_preloader and wine, that talk to each other through
pipes. Unfortunately, stracing either one of the processes masks the
problem. That is, I cannot reproduce the hang while doing strace.

                                 Pekka