Cc: <linux-kernel@...>, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>, Mike Galbraith <efault@...>, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...>, Dmitry Adamushko <dmitry.adamushko@...>, Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@...>
Ingo,
I've accidentally discovered a problem with -v18.
Some time ago, I wrote a small program to prevent my laptop from entering
low-power mode, and noticed that after upgrading my laptop's kernel from
2.4.20.9+cfs-v6 to 2.4.20.14+cfs-v18, it completely freezes if I run this
program.
The program is trivial, it just sets its prio to nice +20 and forks a busy
loop. I've added the ability to stop the loop after a user-definable number
of iterations, and I can confirm that it unfreezes when the loop ends. I'm
not even root when I run it.
Everything freezes, including the frame-buffer. It's not 100% reproducible, I
would say 90% only. Sometimes it requires a few seconds before freezing. It
*seems* to me that running another task in parallel (such as vmstat) increases
its chances to freeze. It seems like nicing to +19 does not cause any trouble.
I've tried it on my dual athlon, and with 1 process I see occasional pauses of
1 or 2 seconds, and with 2 processes, I see fairly larger pauses.
Here's the trivial program. Probably you'll find an obvious bug.
Regards,
Willy
---
/*
* cfs-freeze.c
* Fork a busy loop running with idle prio. This often results
* in complete freezes with CFS-v18.
*
* $ gcc -O2 -s -o cfs-freeze cfs-freeze.c
* $ ./cfs-freeze
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sched.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
struct sched_param sch;
long long i;
if (argc > 1)
i = atoll(argv[1]);
if (i <= 0)
i = 4 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000ULL;
sch.sched_priority = 0;
sched_setscheduler(0, SCHED_OTHER, &sch);
setpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, 0, 20);
if (fork() == 0)
while (i--);
return 0;
}
---
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