n Thu, 21 Feb 2002 12:19:55 xs@kittenz.org said most everything I could have thought of to say and some more besides, but see below:
on Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 11:01:57PM +0000, Ricardo Campos wrote:
- If I need to do anything that is intensive disk-wise (writing large files to disk), I am unable to do anything else, otherwise the system locks up. A symptom of this, for example, is that xmms loops about a second of the MP3 I'm playing. X does not respond to ctrl-alt-backspace, the system doesn't respond to ctrl+alt+del.
Is this a temporary lock up or a permanent one? Unix systems in general can get into a situation where an application has written so mych data into the disk cache that is then being written out to disk that there is no disk bandwith to read anything in - any process that requires something to get pages in to run will not run until the disk write is complete.
If the lock up is permanent I would make sure you have the Magic SysReq key enabled in your kernel (from the debug menu at the end in make xconfig) as this may help you unount filesystems before reseting the box and this may save an fsck on next boot.
Also, if the lock up is permanent does the disk writing stop? If so does this happen immediately the system appears to lock for other tasks or does it carry on in the background and stop at a later date.
I think xmms probably seems to be looping the MP3 because the audio is buffered somewhere (possibly sound card, maybe kernel) I have seen similar problems under win32 on a laptop, but the trigger was high network traffic.
I am pretty sure this is happenning on the card - if the card doesn't get fed any new data and isn't told to stop it just keeps looping round the data it doesn have. This means that you cannot take the fact that sound still plays even as an indication that the kernel still responds to interrupts.
Steve.