Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 11:56:53 -0500 (CDT) From: "Conrad J. Sabatier" <conrads@cox.net> To: Kenneth Stailey <kstailey@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: System load as crash factor with preemption??? Message-ID: <XFMail.20040804115653.conrads@cox.net> In-Reply-To: <20040804140103.69280.qmail@web50601.mail.yahoo.com>
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On 04-Aug-2004 Kenneth Stailey wrote: > http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html > > << Problems persist with crashes and hangs under heavy load, > especially under SMP. The recent introduction of full-scale > preemption exasperated the problem, though it has been mitigated by a > recently committed hack. Speculation on the source of the problem > seems to center around races in critical section and spinlock > handling and nesting. This needs to be driven to root cause and > fixed in order for 5.3 to be considered STABLE. >> One thing I've been wondering about in all the postings I've seen re: the preemption-related crashes: reference is made repeatedly to crashes occurring under heavy load, yet my box (AMD Athlon 64, single-processor) was crashing under practically no load at all. With the no-preemption hack, the box has been quite stable, by the way. Also, my other machine, an AMD Athlon (32-bit), single-processor, running an i386 build, never experienced any crashes, yet it bears much more load most of the time than the 64-bit box, as I use it as my gateway, cvsup daemon, NFS server, etc, etc. Just makes me question how much of a factor load really played in this problem, and thought it might be worth mentioning. -- Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads@cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"
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