hald causing stutters

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 23:12 +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> > > > Watching my CPU use, I get a spike every 5 seconds (a cheap one thousand
> > > > and one, two thousand and two quess).
[...snip...]
> I don't know what you would define as crippled, but I'm on a 4 day old
> Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 2GHz processor, 768MB Ram.
> 
> Interestingly, and this may have nothing to do with it, but even though
> I have a 780MB swap partition and fstab seems to have picked it up, it
> doesn't seem to be 'enabled'.  I mention this because I've heard that
> the kernel likes to have 'some' swap space.
> 
> fdisk /dev/hda shows:
> 
> Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1               1           6       48163+  de  Dell Utility
> /dev/hda2               7         372     2939895    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda3             373         715     2755147+  db  CP/M / CTOS / ...
> /dev/hda4             716        7296    52861882+   5  Extended
> /dev/hda5   *         716         725       80293+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda6             726        1745     8193118+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda7            1746        1843      787153+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
> /dev/hda8            1844        5158    26627706   83  Linux
> 
> less /etc/fstab shows:
> 
> # This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
> LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
> LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
> none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
> none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
> LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
> none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
> none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
> LABEL=SWAP-hda7         swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
> 
> less /proc/meminfo shows
> 
> MemTotal:       774344 kB
> MemFree:         11500 kB
> Buffers:         26664 kB
> Cached:         255784 kB
> SwapCached:          0 kB
> Active:         381484 kB
> Inactive:       166756 kB
> HighTotal:           0 kB
> HighFree:            0 kB
> LowTotal:       774344 kB
> LowFree:         11500 kB
> SwapTotal:           0 kB
> SwapFree:            0 kB
> Dirty:               0 kB
> Writeback:           0 kB
> Mapped:         324336 kB
> Slab:           201824 kB
> CommitLimit:    387172 kB
> Committed_AS:   998888 kB
> PageTables:       4052 kB
> VmallocTotal:   245752 kB
> VmallocUsed:      3332 kB
> VmallocChunk:   242204 kB
> HugePages_Total:     0
> HugePages_Free:      0
> Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

I may be out of touch since I'm not using a rawhide kernel, but I don't
believe swap space supports an e2label, and would be surprised if that
has changed. Try changing your /etc/fstab like so:

/dev/hda7      swap             swap    defaults        0 0

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could point out whether this
discrepancy would result in the symptoms you're observing.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE