RE: Lockups with 2.4.14 and 2.4.16

[Brad Dameron]

We use the same motherboards. And for some reason if you put 1 gig in them
exactly and then in the kernel under "Processor type/High Memory Support" we
set it to use 4 gig it locks up the machine every once in a while. We ended
up putting in 1.5 gig of ram and that seemed to fix it. If you didn't
compile in the 4 gig support Linux wouldn't recognize the full 1 gig of
memory for some reason. This is on a Redhat 7.1 machine with 2.4.x kernel's.

---
Brad Dameron									Network Account Executive
TSCNet Inc.								         	www.tscnet.com
Silverdale, WA.									1-888-8TSCNET

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail]
> [mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Johan Ekenberg
> Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 3:30 PM
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: Lockups with 2.4.14 and 2.4.16
>
>
> We recently upgraded 10 servers from 2.2.19 to 2.4.14/2.4.16. Since then,
> several servers have experienced severe lockups forcing hardware
> resets. The
> machines are Intel PIII (Dual) SMP running Epox motherboards. Here are the
> details:
>
> ## The Story:
>  - Suddenly a machine gets a load average of about 500-1000.
>  - It's not possible to log in either at the console or by SSH.
>  - Some commands are possible to run through ssh from a remote
> server, like:
>    "ssh badserver ps auxwf" or "ssh badserver free"
>  - Despite a system load of 1000, commands like "free", "ps" and "uptime"
> often respond quickly, no "sluggishness".
>  - The locked up machine seems to use all available memory plus a
> good deal
> of swap
>  - The process table gets bigger and bigger, mainly ipop3d processes from
> users trying to fetch mail but getting no reply.
>  - The processors seem to be mostly idle.
>  - Killing processes doesn't work, not even with SIGKILL.
>  - We haven't been able to find a time pattern for the lockups, or to
> reproduce them at will.
>  - No kernel error messages are written to the console or logs.
>  - Ctrl-alt-delete produces a "Rebooting"-message on the console,
> but there
> is no actual reboot. Power cycling is the only way out.
>  - My not-so-professional guess is that the machine is locked up
> waiting for
> some disk i/o that never happens, either to swap or normal
> filesystem. But,
> I might be all wrong.
>
> ## Hardware:
>  - Dual PIII 850 on Epox BXB-S and Epox KP6-BS
>  - 1Gb RAM (4x256)
>  - Mylex AcceleRAID 352 PCI RAID Controller,
>    IBM disks, 3x36Gb Raid-5 mounted on /
>    and 2x18 Raid-1 mounted on /var/spool
>  - 1x20Gb IDE for /boot and swap (2 x 2Gb swap partitions)
>  - 1x36Gb IDE for backups
>
> ## Kernel:
>  - 2.4.14 and 2.4.16
>  - Patched for reiserfs-quota with patches found at
>    ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mason/patches/reiserfs/quota-2.4/
>      ( * 50_quota-patch
>        * dquota_deadlock
>        * nesting
>        * reiserfs-quota )
>  - Complete kernel-config found here:
> http://www.ekenberg.se/2.4-trouble/2.4.16-config
>  - Boot parameters are: "ether=0,0,eth1 panic=60 noapic"
>
> ## Filesystems:
>  - ReiserFS (3.6) except /boot which is ext2
>
> ## General
>  - The servers are used mainly for:
>    * Apache/PHP with ~1000 VHosts
>    * Mail (Sendmail, imap, pop3)
>    * MySQL
>
> ## /etc/fstab:
> /dev/rd/c0d0    /           reiserfs
> defaults,usrquota,noatime,notail   1
> 1
> /dev/rd/c0d1    /var/spool  reiserfs
> defaults,usrquota,noatime,notail   1
> 1
> /dev/hdb1       /hdb1       reiserfs    defaults,noatime,notail 0 0
> /dev/hda1       /boot       ext2        defaults  1  1
> /dev/hda2       swap        swap        defaults  0  0
> /dev/hda3       swap        swap        defaults  0  0
> none            /dev/pts    devpts      gid=5,mode=620  0   0
> none            /proc       proc        defaults   0   0
>
> ## lspci:
> 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge
> (rev 03)
> 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP
> bridge (rev
> 03)
> 00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
> 00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
> 00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
> 00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
> 00:08.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone]
> (rev 30)
> 00:09.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone]
> (rev 30)
> 00:0a.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation: Unknown device 0964 (rev 02)
> 00:0a.1 RAID bus controller: Mylex Corporation: Unknown device
> 0050 (rev 02)
> 00:0c.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U2/W / 7890
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86c368 [Trio 3D/2X] (rev 02)
>
>
> This is my first post to LKML, please forgive me if I forgot some relevant
> info.
> Please Cc: replies as I'm not subscribed to LKML.
>
> Best regards,
> /Johan Ekenberg
>
>
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