Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 6 Feb 2003 00:12:59 +0100 | From | Patrick Mau <> | Subject | pdflush in D state |
| |
Hi there,
I have a strange observation regarding the pdflush kernel threads. My system has 512MB RAM. The behavior is independand of the filesystem type in use. I have tested ext2, ext3 and reiserfs.
The scenario goes like this:
- Create a new filesystem on a spare partition. All other partitions on this disk are NTFS and not mounted.
- Copy the whole XFree source there.
- "sync ; sync ; sync" and wait a few minutes (I really tried waiting more than 5 minutes)
- now there are 400MB used by the page cache
- start the build with "make World"
XFree creates its Makefiles using "imake". After that it tries to remove many non-existant files to clean the source tree.
This goes extremly fast, but after a few seconds pdflush gets stuck in D state and tries to write back dirty pages. The machine is completly unresponsive and "top" reports 75 percent IO wait time. The actual build has not even started.
I have no idea what pdflush is trying to do ... The files are already written and there is no other disk activity involved. I even tried single-user mode.
The kernel is BK current 2.5.59, the machine is a P4@2.4 GHz.
Has somebody else observed this ?
cheers, Patrick - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |