RE: [gentoo-sparc] 2.6.7 Kernel stability (was: RE: [gentoo-sparc ] ALSA support on s parc)

[Leif Sawyer]

Keith M Wesolowski writes:
in response to my:
>
> > make -j all
> >
> > uptime: 09:41:41 up 10m, 2 users, load avg: 200.90, 65.79, 23.42
> > ...
> > Dec 3 09:48:05  VM: killing process apache2
>
> > OOMkiller 'feels' more aggressive in -rc2, but still
> > doesn't have the instability that gds-267-r16 has
>
> [...]
>
> I question the use of make -j as a stress test.  What is the desired
> behaviour of running this command, other than not to crash the OS?


The desired behaviour was to hard-stress the system and determine at what
patch-point the crashing behaviour was introduced.

I reported that gds-267-r16 hard-crashed in under 2m of this stress test
due to bugs in the memory allocation process (to my untrained eye)

Jeremy asked me to check 2.6.7-rc1 and 2.6.7-rc2 to see if the bug was
evident in either of those.

I reported that it wasn't.

The entire point of this is to determine why lockups are happening
on SMP Ultra-2 sparcs.

Since I'm not seeing any lockups -- except for gds-267-r16, under this
stress
test, this is the only method I have at this point to evaluate different
kernels.


My reporting of when the OOM and VM killers strike is merely to show the
slight
difference in kernel operation, and to show where (if any) instability might
be creeping in.

For instance, in the same period of time, the VM killer did not strike in
-rc1,
yet did strike in -rc2.  Is this a cause for concern?  Not for me.  Maybe
for
somebody who understands the internal differences.  Hence I pass on the
info.
Note that I was not extremely detailed in my reporting of it, although I do
have the full logfile for anybody who is that interested.

--
  leif