XO becomes unresponsive

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:34 AM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
> Was running a 'find' command (in Terminal) against the principal partition
> of the SD card.  Noticed that the XO became unresponsive. Went to the text
> console (ctl-alt-F2) and tried to log in.  That, too, didn't go - because
> the XO never completed the login.

Ouch.

> In the meantime, every four or so seconds (i.e., periodically) the following
> group of 9 text lines was being output on the text console
>
>  olpc-ec: running cmd 0x15

I think that that's normal, and completely unrelated.

> Note:  I typically experience unresponsiveness on F11-on-XO sooner or later
> (often during a 'find' [which I use heavily]).  The unresponsiveness seems
> to come on sooner with Soas2 run from an USB stick - then I do not have a
> swap partition "active".

Interesting. If you have the time and inclination, could you run that
find (perhaps without the swap, so you hit the problem sooner), it
should freeze, and ideally come back after a while (perhaps an hour or
more). After it comes back, /var/log/messages may have something of
value.

Another thing to test is to disable the ramdisks for /var/log and
~/.sugar/default/log. I don't know where they are defined, IIRC
there's a file in /etc that extends fstab.

:: Aside :: anything that results in verbose logging to /var/log/* or
~/.sugar/default/log leads to memory pressure that doesn't abate.

It bothers me that we have ever-growing ramdisks without any kind of
gc on a notably ram-constrained platform. Was there ever a plan made
for this? Perhaps it's time to execute it.

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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