Kernel "dead pauses" since 2.6.5-1.332

[Dave Jones]

On Sun, 2004-04-25 at 03:25, Aleksey Nogin wrote:

> 
> I am seeing something like this too. The way it looks for me is as if 
> the hard drive just stops responding - everything that wants disk access 
> freezes, but everything else keeps working normally. Once in a while the 
> disk would "unfreeze", I would see a lot of disk activity, and then 
> another freeze (for a periods varying from a few seconds to couple of 
> minutes).

I think we've got a handle on this. On a "low" memory box (128/256mb or
so), it's easy to reproduce. updatedb cron.daily job never runs to
completion for me.

It's the ext3 block reservation patch that's the culprit. (The details
are pretty icky)   There's been a number of fixes to that in the last
few days, so hopefully we'll see resolution on it real soon.

	Dave