CURRENT, devbuf memory allocation and hald

Fri Apr 18 00:03:22 UTC 2008

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 13:03 +0200, Pascal Hofstee wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> After updating my CURRENT system i noticed that my system started to
> completely break down after a while (ususally after coming home from a
> day at college) with the console spewing loads of messages about
> ata-subsystem(s) being unable to allocate any memory, existing shells
> no longer being able to fork new subprocesses because of memory
> problems etc. Initially i had assumed it might bave been a rare side
> effect of the recent commits to the ATA-system, at least one of which
> Soren mentioned fixed a couple of bogons.
> 
> Now after some additionial investigation i have come to the
> realisation that the most likely source of the problem was because
> according to vmstat -m the "InUse" statistics for the memory type
> "devbuf" were consistently increasing by about 140k over a 10 second
> time peroid. I decided to shoot down any daemons originating from
> port-installed software to ensure the problem was indeed caused by
> some part of the base system and not some 3rd party influence and i
> managed to trace the problem down to hald.
> 
> Whenever i halted hald the increase in devbuf-usage would halt (not
> decline simply stay at the same value), and as soon as i started hald
> again the increase would resume with the 140k/10s ratio until hald was
> stopped again.
> 
> If anyone in the FreeBSD-GNOME team might have any idea with regards
> to what may be causing this problem i am more than happy to cooperate
> in trying to resolve this issue.
> 
> The system in question is an AMD Athlon64 3800+, 2GB RAM using an MSI
> K9N-Neo (nVidia MCP55-based mainboard) running FreeBSD/i386
> 8.0-CURRENT as of April 16th late afternoon CET.

I just upgraded to:

FreeBSD lasagna.marcuscom.com 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #38: Thu
Apr 17 19:26:21 EDT 2008
marcus at lasagna.marcuscom.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/LASAGNA  amd64

And I can no longer reproduce.  Running -CURRENT from yesterday did
exhibit the problem, though.

Joe

-- 
PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-gnome/attachments/20080418/2704732a/attachment.pgp