Duncan wrote:
Daniel Iliev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED],
excerpted below, on Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:30:54 +0300:
Petter Haggholm wrote:
The subject is fairly descriptive. Often -- but not always -- an
emerge will render my system unusable. At a PORTAGE_NICENESS of 3, and
fairly standard MAKEOPTS of "-j2" (on a single-core system), I'm ...
well, rather surprised, confused, and very frustrated. [] The system
becomes unresponsive, the mouse will move but with enough of a lag that
physically moving it may not cause a cursor movement for the next 30
seconds or so, clicking a taskbar window may not have an effect at all;
sometimes I can't even ssh into the system from my other computer (to
kill the emerge) because it's slow enough that the ssh daemon times out
my login attempt. This never used to happen[.]
2) What happens if you put PORTAGE_NICENESS=19, MAKEOPTS of "-j2 -l1" ?
l5 (small "L", not the number "one"), means "loadavg=<1" If loadavg goes
up to 1 make waits this level to drop before continuing its job
3) Is DMA enabled for your HDD(s)? (hdparm -d1 /dev/xxx)?
I second those two suggestions.
It never used to happen? I'll just /bet/ you somehow disabled hard drive
DMA access. In addition to checking hdparm, ensure that you have the
correct drivers for your hard drive chipset being compiled with the kernel
and verify from your log (or dmesg) that they are loaded and active -- the
kernel isn't loading generic drivers that grab the hardware first so the
chipset specific drivers can't grab the hardware themselves.
It's almost certainly I/O access in any case, so portage niceness probably
won't do a lot of good, tho reducing to -j1 or -j2 -l1 or -j1 -l1 might
help some. You can also try different I/O and task schedulers, and tweak
your kernel preemption settings.
[snip the stuff about systems with lots of RAM; mine doesn't]
I figured I'd give your suggestion a shot. I certainly never *disabled*
hdparm, and I haven't altered my kernel options for IDE drivers in ...
well, heaven knows how long. However, upon checking my menuconfig, I
find that I unnecessarily have generic IDE chipset support in addition
to the appropriate driver; I just disabled that, recompiled the kernel,
and rebooted (for the first time in 19 days, which made the pre-reboot
dmesg output a little intractable).
I/O schedulers ... well, I've already played around with those, as well
as playing with the kernel pre-emption and timer settings, and no
permutation helped before, so I left that as it was.
So far, it looks promising -- I just built a package that caused me
problems earlier, followed by an `emerge -DuN world` (only four
packages, though); no problems yet. Unfortunately, the problem has
appeared nondeterministic, so I don't yet know whether it'll magically
reappear to terrorise me later. Hopefully, the IDE driver thing fixed
it; if not, I'll be back to complain more when the problem reappears.
Thank you for the help, and wish me luck ...
--
Petter Häggholm
--
[email protected] mailing list
