6.3-PRERELEASE desktop system periodically freezes momentarily

Kris Kennaway kris at FreeBSD.org
Sun Jan 13 12:10:00 PST 2008


Wayne Sierke wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 12:39 +0100, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>> MUTEX_PROFILING changes the kernel ABI so modules that are not compiled 
>> with that option will not work.  If you use make buildkernel to build 
>> your kernel + modules together then it uses the kernel config file for 
>> both so they are compatible, otherwise your modules only are built with 
>> default options.  So, if you have any other modules apart from nvidia 
>> then use make buildkernel for those, and add -DMUTEX_PROFILING to the 
>> CFLAGS of the nvidia build and try that.  It may still not be enough 
>> since nvidia is a wrapper around a binary module, so you may also need 
>> to revert to nv.
>>
>> Kris
> 
> Kris,
> 
> Success, I hope. I noticed that the duration of the pause when the
> stuttering occurs is obviously magnified, I'd guess probably by approx a
> factor of 5. e.g. normally stuttering interval is quite short, perhaps
> 50-100ms at a guess, with debug.mutex.prof.enable=1 duration of stutter
> might be 200ms or so. I understand that this is to be expected, just
> want to let you know.
> 
> Could you please confirm that I'm following correct procedure to obtain
> results, then I'll endeavour to capture logs for the other freezes that
> I witness. And of course let me know if you want anything specific from
> me.

Yeah, this shows things like contention between the mouse device and 
other parts of the kernel that still require the Giant lock in 6.x.  It 
is not likely that these will be fixed in 6.x but most of them are in 
7.0, so you should obtain better performance by upgrading to 7.0.

Kris


More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list