On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Andy Whitcroft wrote: > > I have a couple of failed test runs against 2.6.23-rc6 where the > job timed out while running dbench over ext3. Both on powerpc, > though both significantly different hardware setups. A failed > run like this implies that the machine was still responsive to > other processes but the dbench was making no progress. There is > no console diagnostics during the failure. Since the machine seems to be otherwise alive, can you do a sysrq-W (which is most easily done by just doing a echo w > /proc/sysrq-trigger and you don't actually need any console access or anything like that). That should give you all the blocked process traces, and if it's a deadlock on some semaphore or other, it should all stand out quite nicely. In fact, things like the above are probably worth scripting for any automated testing - if you auto-fail after some time, please make the failure case do that sysrq-W by default. (The other sysrq things can be useful too - "T" shows the same as "W", except for _all_ tasks, which is often so verbose that it hides the problem, but is sometimes the right thing to do). Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
