Well it doesn't happen on my test machine (UP or SMP). I tried
various recordsizes. It's probably related to HZ, memory bandwidth
and the precise timing at which things happen.
The test describes itself thusly:
* This test generates a load which simulates a process-loaded system.
*
* The test creates a ring of processes, each connected to its predecessor
* and successor by a pipe. After the ring is created, the parent process
* injects some dummy data records into the ring and then joins. The
* processes pass the data records around the ring until they are killed.
*
It'll be starvation in the CPU scheduler I expect. For some reason
the ring of piping processes is just never giving a timeslice to
anything else. Or maybe something to do with the exceptional
wakeup strategy which pipes use.
Don't now, sorry. One for the kernel/*.c guys.
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