Problems with the 'flush-8:0' process in 2.6.35.3

[Andrej Podzimek <andrej@podzimek.org>]

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Hello,

I use a 2.6.35.3 kernel and Reiser4 as the root file system. In a couple of minutes after boot, a kernel process called 'flush-8:0' takes up all the available CPU time. From that moment on, it is impossible to sync filesystems (and suspend, hibernate or reboot). (The 'sync' command halts indefinitely.) In some cases it is even impossible to log in. Existing sessions seem to work fine, to an extent.

I first thought this was related to the GTT chipset coherency patch. (This patch fixes a one-year-old bug that caused all the Intel 855 class GPUs to be totally unusable.) However, removing the patch and testing with only a vanilla kernel (and Reiser4, of course) showed that 'flush-8:0' will eventually go mad, no matter if the GPU-related patch is present or not.

The machine is an Asus M2400N laptop with a 100GB Seagate Momentus.

Is this a known issue? How could I track this down? In fact I don't even know whether this is related to Reiser4 or not. It may be a bug in VFS. I don't use 'noflushd' or anything of that kind. (Some people reported similar problems related to noflushd. So this is not the case.) If this is unrelated to Reiser4, where should I report it?

Andrej


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