7.0BETA4 desktop system also periodically freezes

Kris Kennaway kris at FreeBSD.org
Wed Jan 9 11:38:32 PST 2008


J.R. Oldroyd wrote:
> I believe this same problem may also be present on 7.0, at least on
> the BETA releases; BETA4 is the latest I have here.
> 
> I have the same problem on two systems here: periodically the systems
> will stop dead (no mouse action, no ping responses from other systems,
> processes with windows on the screen also freeze); the hangs can be
> anything from a few seconds to several MINUTES; then it all comes back
> "as if nothing happened" except that keyboard input during the freeze
> is lost.  Most of my freezes are a few seconds long, some are in the
> 15-60 second range, but (fortunately, rarely) I have seen some that
> lasted 10-15 MINUTES!
> 
> The only obvious indication after the return is that the system load
> average monitor peaks up, typically from the 0-0.5 range before the
> hang to 1.5-2 after the hang, then immediately decays back down.  Just
> as if some real-time prio process had grabbed the processor exclusively
> for a while.  Except I have no rtprio processes that I know of.
> 
> It is not swap related.  One of the systems here has 4GB ram and is
> not swapping, even after one of these freezes.  It doesn't even swap
> while running X, with the mailer open, several xterms and firefox and
> a make running.
> 
> I had not reported this because I figured this was yet another problem
> with xorg-7.3.  I am unable to make it happen on demand.  As yet it
> seems random.  I am able to do CPU-intensive stuff (e.g., port builds)
> without problems: it doesn't trigger the freeze and I don't even see
> the jerky mouse problem that folk also talk of.  I am running a make
> right now in fact, just to see if it'll do it.  Of course, it's fine.
> 
> But the phone might ring, so I'll stop doing things, the system will
> become pretty-much idle, then I'll go to move the mouse and it might be
> frozen.  When it comes back, the small load peak shows, but top and ps
> show nothing unusual.
> 
> As I said, I have two systems here which exhibit this.  Both systems
> here are 7.0BETA4.  Different i386 hardware; both are UP systems; one is
> a fast 3200Ghz processor with 4GB ram, the other is a very slow
> processor with not much ram at all; the scheduler is SCHED_ULE on both;
> and the app mix includes basic servers:
> 	/usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant
> 	dhclient
> 	/sbin/devd
> 	/usr/sbin/syslogd
> 	/usr/local/sbin/cupsd
> 	/usr/sbin/ntpd
> 	/usr/sbin/powerd
> 	/usr/sbin/sshd
> 	sendmail
> 	/usr/sbin/cron
> 	/usr/sbin/moused
> 	/usr/local/bin/xdm (on the fast system only)
> 	/usr/local/bin/X
> and various end-user clients such as a WM and its children (including
> load graph and a clock), firefox, xterms, ical, nvi, etc.
> 
> Because it is unpredictable, I don't have any profiling of this for
> you.  But I wanted to throw this out there since I am not sure the
> problem is 6.x-related.
> 
> Oh, both systems ran 6.2-stable with xorg-6.9 and didn't have this
> problem.  Also, there doesn't seem to be any indication of hardware
> issues on either.
> 
> 	-jr
> 

OK, same requests as to the others then.

Kris


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