Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 10 May 2010 20:18:00 -0400 | Subject | PROBLEM: tickless scheduling | From | Donald Allen <> |
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1. Network file transfers and fscks stop on Toshiba netbook unless system receives external events 2. I have a new Toshiba NB305 on which I installed the beta release of Slackware 13.1, which provides a 2.6.33.3 kernel with the tickless option enabled. With this machine on my ethernet, I attempted to rsync my home directory to it, about 9 Gb, from a workstation that is my primary system (running Slackware 13). The transfer proceeded normally for awhile and then stopped, which I could see in the xterm on the workstation. I went to the netbook to see what was going on there and when I began typing, the transfer resumed. I ran 'top' on the netbook and it would freeze after a few updates, coinciding with the file transfer pausing again. Typing would get things moving. At another point, I tested pm-suspend on the netbook. Suspending worked, but awakening did not, so I had to power-cycle the machine. I use ext2 for reasons which I won't attempt to justify here, so when the machine came back up, it fsck'ed the root filesystem. Here again I saw things grind to a halt -- the progress meter stopped and the there was no disk activity. But if I moved my finger on the touchpad, things would get moving again. The only way to get the fsck to complete was to constantly be tickling the touchpad. I corresponded with Patrick Volkerding, telling him I suspected a scheduling problem and he informed me that the 13.1 kernel had tickless enabled, unlike 13. So I built a 2.6.33.3 kernel (from the Slackware-supplied kernel sources) with tickless disabled. With that kernel running, I power-cycled the machine to force a fsck of the root filesystem. This one proceeded to completion normally -- no external stimuli needed. 3. Tickless, scheduler 4. 2.6.33.3 7.1 ver_linux output attached 7.2 /proc/cpuinfo attached 7.3 /proc/modules attached 7.4 /proc/ioports, /proc/iomem attached 7.5 lspci attached 7.6 /proc/scsi/scsi attached [unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream][unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream][unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream][unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream][unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream][unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream][unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream] | |