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SubjectLinux 2.1.92 -- Disk access, sound, swapping
Disk access seems a bit slower (sometimes enough to be finger tapping).
Sound has gone from playing one sound flawlessly and then giving the
DMA/IRQ timeout messages to doing it on every sound including the first.

Now for my report as promised (and maybe not wanted) on the swapping.
I believe this may answer the question of midnight crashes (I estimate
most people are using Debian or RedHat so that this is really the 2am
cash. This is because of cron jobs etc). I originally did this with
2.1.91. To do the test grab and compile the GTK widget set. I am using
0.99.9. Install it and strip --strip-unneeded the gtk libs (I have
done this with all my installed libs if it makes a difference). Ok,
now go back to the gtk source dirs. In the gtk subdir compile the
testgtk. (The make file has an option for this in it. I suggest it be
used just for ease. I believe it was make test.)

Ok, now go to the clist demo. Keep adding 10,000 items. Watch free as
you do this. You will eventually run out of swap and it will then go
idle but locked solid. Disk access at this point (on my system) is
about every 3-10 seconds. Eventually it calms down to the point it is
doing it ever 1 to 5 minutes. I imagine if I left it for an hour
instead of 10 minutes it may calm down more. The system is locked solid
as far as I can tell. It is the middle of the night so I didn't want to
boot up another computer and wake people up just to test telnet and
ping.

It seems the swapper doesn't no when to give up. Maybe it is trying to
make swapfiles on my ext2 partitions. I don't know. Anyway, I see this
as a problem.

Also with 2.1.92 the kernel takes less memory itself (same options as
2.1.91) and boots a tad faster (with the raising if commented out and
with the CONFIG_SERIAL stuff commented). On half the binaries it loads
very fast. The other semi slow. This may be related to the disk access
problem noted above. Also, while on memory, exactly 1/2 the mem being
cache while it has about 20 meg in swap is crazy I think. Maybe I just
don't know what the cache is (refering to the one reported by
/proc/meminfo and free). I would appreciate someone telling me (in
private if nothing else in the message pertains to this list).

Anyway, my kernel settings are the same as my last post save Sound Blast
irq is now 5 (nothing at all on that). My system is a UP (kernel
compiled UP) Pentium 133 with 72 meg of RAM and 2 3.2 gig WD EIDE
drives. I have one 24x EIDE CD-ROM and an AHA 152x scsi card with a
(usually turned off) Mustek 3 pass color scanner and an internal CD-RW
(Ricoh). USR X2 Voice/Fax/Modem and a NetGear DEC Tulip card (FA-310TX
or something like that). I think that is pretty much everytthing. As
for the motherboard, I cannot tell, cant find much useful writing in the
system docs or on the motherboard. It was originally an off the shelf
Digital Starion 940. It still has the original motherboard.

I hope this report helps in finding the problems. Sorry I am not more
thorough but I have no time to learn how the kernel works on a large
enough scale to debug it further or post patches.

Greetings to all, thanks for a great kernel that just keeps getting
better,

Trever Adams
arabian@onramp.net


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