[ltp] Freezes SuSE 7.1/7.2 and TP T 21

[Paul Hahn]

Hi everyone. I used to run Suse 7.1 on my home machine and we run it at 
work in development and production. I am going to try and offer some 
opinions on this, as I have experienced all these problems before.

First, you can kill processes until the cows come home- eventually the 
system will hang. Not at first, but eventually. This a kernel issue-- 
specifically one that relates to multi-threading and heavy loads. When 
we max one of our servers at work beyond a certain point-- it starts 
exhibiting slow responses. Eventually even ls and ps will not respond or 
will produce core dumps. This happens in X as freezes or locking. When 
the kernel goes afoul, anything can happen- some X files in your window 
manager can go crazy and you can loose icons. I do not know what kind of 
funk the kernel built with Suse 7.1 has- but to fix it you must rebuild 
the kernel. We have custom built a 2.5 version of the kernel with a 
recommended release of gcc and have had no problems on our servers or 
our desktop machines since this. It is important to realize that you 
must use a certain version of gcc when building enterprise/OS level 
tools like kernels and X. Not just any gcc will do.  I think that the 
particular version of the kernel in 7.1- plus the version of gcc it was 
compiled under have caused this problem. If you compile anything 
multi-threaded without an approved version of gcc-- like X-- this is 
liable to happen even if your kernel is good. I would not be suprised if 
other 2.4x kernels in other distros have trouble as well-- like the user 
reporting freezing under Mandrake. RedHat, however-- does seem to be 
stable with multi-threading. I contribute this to the -ac build mods put 
into it-- which address alot of multi-threading issues. Bottom line is 
if you want it stable-- build it yourself or upgrade to a newer or 
different distro.

I am basing what I am saying on our 5 production systems at work 
running: our own custom built multi-threaded transaction manager,  
Oracle 8, apache with the usual, and the rest of the Suse 7.1 stuff. We 
never had these problems on the 2.2x kernels we were running on Red Hat. 
However we needed 2.4 capabilities with our transaction manager, so we 
switched to 7.1 Suse and the 2.4 kernel- and since then we had problems. 
Since building our own kernel with our own gcc, we have had no problems. 
We also run about 40 client sites on Samba servers- some redhat- some 
Suse 7.1. We have had the same problem with the sites using Suse 7.1. It 
is not X specifically that is crashing your system-- it is its 
implementation of threads and the kernels. Since X is the heaviest user 
of threading on your laptop-- is a desktop type system and not a server: 
it is what "causes" the machine to crash-- or rather what symptom 
produces the crash. Other components for Linux do not often cause this 
as they are programs that use "forking" only and do not attempt to 
manage their threads. So Apache and many other apps can run very, very, 
stable-- thus making one assume it is only X with the problem.

Hope this helps,
Paul Hahn



Bradley W. Langhorst wrote:

> marcus.giles@deltagold.com.au wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> No it doesn't unfortunately.
>> I've also lost all my desktop icons in the last freeze up...
>> The problem gets stranger and stranger...
>> Marcus
>>
>>
> are you guys using gpm and /dev/gpmdata in X ?
>
>
> if so you could try restarting gpm
>
> you can't use both gpm and /dev/psaux  in X at the same time  - but I 
> think your problems would be more consistent if you were
>
> brad
>
>
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