Complete hangs while extracting source

[Lowell Gilbert]

Jakob Breivik Grimstveit <jakob at grimstveit.no> writes:

> My entire system stops completely while unpacking large tar files, like when
> building OpenOffice2.0-devel. Sound goes into a loop with a timeframe of
> 0.001 seconds, mouse pointer stops responding, everything goes to a halt.
> This lasts about 0.5 seconds, then it starts working again, and then halts
> again and so on, until the tarfile is completely uncompressed.
> 
> Is this expected behaviour? Is it a broken scheduler? Am I incuding something
> in the kernel which I shouldn't have?

Sounds more like an interrupt issue.  

> [jakobbg at nusse conf]$ grep -i sched /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/NUSSE 
> options         SCHED_4BSD              # 4BSD scheduler
> options         _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING # POSIX P1003_1B real-time extensions
> [jakobbg at nusse conf]$ uname -a
> FreeBSD nusse.starshipping.com 5.4-RELEASE-p7 FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p7 #17: Tue Sep 13 19:31:11 CEST 2005     root at nusse.starshipping.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/NUSSE  i386

Are you seeing interrupt storms?
What kind of controller are you using on that hard disk, and is
anything else sharing the same interrupt?