Re: [amd64] System lockups still continuing

> Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:09:19 -0500 (CDT)
> From: "Conrad J. Sabatier" <conrads_at_cox.net>
> 
> 
> On 19-Jul-2004 Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >> 
> >> On 18-Jul-2004 Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
> >> > I had posted several weeks ago about constant hard lockups of my
> >> > amd64 box.  At first, I attributed the problem to GNOME, then to
> >> > my kernel config, but now it appears to me that the problem
> >> > really lies with Mozilla/Firefox.
> >> 
> >> Well, another theory bites the dust.  I tried running GNOME
> >> yesterday, never touched Mozilla or Firefox, and the system locked
> >> up while doing some file management chores in Nautilus.
> >> 
> >> It must be something low-level in GNOME, some shared library,
> >> probably, but I have yet to track it down.
> > 
> > I have lost track of the full thread and this mail list is not
> > tracked by google :-(, so this may have been ruled out. Are you sure
> > that it's not the preemption problem that is biting you? This applies
> > to CURRENT systems only, so may not be applicable to what you are
> > seeing, the symptoms are a match.
> 
> Hmm, you may be right.  Is there any workaround for this?  I've tried
> both SCHED_ULE and SCHED_4BSD, both producing the same results.
> 
> What's strange is that this only seems to occur when either running a
> full-blown GNOME desktop or using some GNOME-related app under another
> environment.
> 
> I'm currently working under KDE, just for comparison, and no such
> problems have occurred, unless I try using, say, Mozilla or Firefox.
> 
> I'll Cc: this to current and see what they think.

The problem is not specific to ULE or 4BSD. A fix was checked in last
night, so cvsup and rebuild might just fix it. Early reports are that
the patch resolves the problem, but the author is not sure that this is
a complete fix.

If that does not work, you will need to back off 4 files to July 2
before jhb committed the preemption code.
/sys/i386/i386/intr_machdep.c v 1.6 
/sys/kern/sched_ule.c v 1.109
/sys/kern/kern_intr.c v 1.110
/sys/sys/interrupt.h v 1.27

Then apply the one line plus one word patch for the new debugger from
/sys/kern/sched_ule.c v 1.115 and you will be OK.
I will be rebuilding my system with the patched code this morning, so
hopefully this is now a thing of the past.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman_at_es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634