Complete hangs while extracting source

[Jakob Breivik Grimstveit]

Lowell Gilbert wrote on Sat, 01 Oct 2005 08:33:

> 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. 

Yes, it does, but doing a top while extracting the Mozilla Thunderbird v1.0.6
source bz2-file (which provokes the sound and mouse jitter problem to occur)
the interrupt level consistently stays below 2% of CPU. However, at times
during the extraction of the file, bsdtar and bzip2 produces system CPU time
of between 30% and 50%. It's during these system peaks that the mouse and
sound starts being jerky.

Getting any wiser with this explanation? :-)

> > [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?

Nope.

> What kind of controller are you using on that hard disk

[jakobbg at corona ~]$ dmesg | grep ATA          
atapci1: <GENERIC ATA controller> port
0xc800-0xc80f,0xb60-0xb63,0x960-0x967,0xbe0-0xbe3,0x9e0-0x9e7 irq 20 at
device 9.0 on pci0 atapci2: <GENERIC ATA controller> port
0xb000-0xb00f,0xb70-0xb73,0x970-0x977,0xbf0-0xbf3,0x9f0-0x9f7 irq 23 at
device 10.0 on pci0

[jakobbg at corona ~]$ dmesg | grep ad4 
ad4: 190782MB <ST3200822AS/3.01> [387621/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA33
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad4s2a

Motherboard: MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum-54G S939.

> and is anything else sharing the same interrupt?

How can I tell? I doubt this to be the problem, since I experience same
problem on two other machines as well. Only thing they share (except same
lousy administrator :-) is that they all run on AMD CPUs (1700+, 1800+ and
3500+).

-- 
Jakob Breivik Grimstveit, <http://www.grimstveit.no/jakob/>, 48298152
Besøk Newsergalleriet: <http://www.newsergalleriet.no/>

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."  -- Walt Disney