On Tue, 23 Aug 2011, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
I'm running ubuntu 11.04 on my thinkpad X200 laptop with their 2.6.38 kernel.
Whenever I copy a lot of data to my harddrive without the power connected
(cryptsetup:ed drive and ubuntus eCryptfs for home directory (yeah I know,
that's two levels of encryption))) the copy stops after 500-1000 megabyte.
It'll just sit there, nothing more happening, my firefox goes into blocking
(greys out). If I then issue a "sync" command in the terminal, things resume
just as normal, until another 500-1000 megabyte has been copied. This doesn't
happen if I have the power cable connected.
I interpret this as when the laptop is in laptop-mode, it doesn't flush data
to drive when memory is "full". Is this a known problem with 2.6.38 kernel,
or might it be something ubuntu specific? I find it strange that not more
people are hit by this...
When doing backups to an external USB drive with dmcrypt->lwm->xfs I saw
the same problem just now. I have to keep a "watch -n 60 sync" running to
keep the copy (and the computer) working properly.
$ uname -a
Linux laptop 2.6.38-11-generic-pae #49-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 29 21:07:33 UTC 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
~$ ps -eo
user,pid,tid,class,rtprio,ni,pri,psr,pcpu,vsz,rss,pmem,stat,wchan:28,cmd | grep firefox
swmike 3541 3541 TS - 0 19 1 11.1 664868 238764 5.9 Sl futex_wait_queue_me /usr/lib/firefox-6.0.1/firefox-bin
swmike 3733 3733 TS - 0 19 0 0.1 106320 17920 0.4 Sl poll_schedule_timeout /usr/lib/firefox-6.0.1/plugin-container /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so -greomni /usr/lib/firefox-6.0.1/omni.jar 3541 true plugin
$ ps -eo
user,pid,tid,class,rtprio,ni,pri,psr,pcpu,vsz,rss,pmem,stat,wchan:28,cmd | grep ddrescue
root 3380 3380 TS - 0 19 0 0.0 5492 1136 0.0 S+ poll_schedule_timeout sudo ddrescue /dev/sdd /t/win7stationar.110903.img
root 3381 3381 TS - 0 19 0 4.6 3104 760 0.0 D+ sync_page ddrescue /dev/sdd /t/win7stationar.110903.img
$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 4012036 3996012 16024 0 660936 2657452
-/+ buffers/cache: 677624 3334412
Swap: 0 0 0
The copy is still running (I think ddrescue does more than dd, with dd it
would be blocked as well). Firefox is blocked (and has been for a few
minutes).
I then issue "sync", flushing commences, and firefox comes back:
~$ ps -eo
user,pid,tid,class,rtprio,ni,pri,psr,pcpu,vsz,rss,pmem,stat,wchan:28,cmd | grep firefox
swmike 3541 3541 TS - 0 19 0 10.7 673316 239816 5.9 Sl poll_schedule_timeout /usr/lib/firefox-6.0.1/firefox-bin
swmike 3733 3733 TS - 0 19 0 0.1 106320 17900 0.4 Sl poll_schedule_timeout /usr/lib/firefox-6.0.1/plugin-container /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so -greomni /usr/lib/firefox-6.0.1/omni.jar 3541 true plugin
I wait 30-60 seconds, firefox goes into blocking again, same remedy, same
behaviour.
Any other diagnosis I can do to help narrow down what's going on?
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@xxxxxxxxx
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