On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 06:01:55PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote: > On my IBM X31 laptop, the system entirely locks up when there's a lot of > disk access, some common situations are: > - when getting heavily into swap due to a runaway process > - when running rpm/yum > > It's not *technically* locked up (i.e. if you wait long enough it will > come back) but in practice you have to reboot if a process has a memory > leak, and you can't do any work while running yum. What kernel are you running? Over the past two months I've put together our 2.6.10-based production kernel from lots of VM, scheduler, and latency patches cherry-picked from -mm and lkml; most of them (especially the VM fixes) are now in 2.6.11-rc2. I do some testing on my Fujitsu laptop (Pentium M 1.6GHz, 768M RAM, 4500 RPM disk), and 2.6.10-mm*-derived kernels respond much better than vanilla 2.6.10 under load, or when doing a massive set of package updates. So trying the Rawhide kernel might be an option, though the 2.6.11-bk tree has had quite a lot breakage of late, including memory leaks. :-/ [I haven't been tracking Fedora/Rawhide kernels since around 2.6.7-1.492, so I don't know how things are working there.] If you feel like doing some patching, you might also want to have a look at Ingo's swapspace-layout-improvements patch, which AKPM added to 2.6.11-rc1-mm2, Andrea's new OOM-killer patches [since long delays killing a process make the OOM killer go a bit berserk], http://groups-beta.google.com/group/linux.kernel/browse_frm/thread/9091db6e91a07f0c and Jens's CFQ time-slice elevator, http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/axboe/patches/v2.6/2.6.11-rc1/cfq-time-slices-20.bz2 Regards, Bill Rugolsky
