Description of problem: Everything seems to work great on the laptop, but after an hour or two, the harddrive starts to grind and grind and grind and eventually the machine become completely unresponsive. This problem persists with both acpi and acpi=off. There doesn't seem to be any process eating the CPU. the laptop has 256 MB of ram and 800 MB of swap. What is odd is that while there is still plenty of physical memory free, huge amounts of swap are in use. Usually the only thing I am running is the the GNOME desktop and a web browser. I'm not sure if it's kernel related or not. I suspected ACPI, but that doesn't seem to matter as it acts the same with acpi on or off. The system worked flawlessly with redhat 9. I did a fresh install of fedora core 2, not an upgrade. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.6.5-1.358 How reproducible: everytime I boot. Steps to Reproduce: 1. boot the laptop 2. work for a while 3. harddrive starts grinding 4. system becomes less and less responsive 5. eventually you have to force it off Actual results: system grinds to a halt Expected results: system continue to work for more than an hour or so. Additional info: dmesg: http://www.botchco.com/alex/x24/dmesg.txt lsmod: http://www.botchco.com/alex/x24/lsmod.txt /proc/acpi: http://www.botchco.com/alex/x24/proc-acpi.txt
Keep a terminal window open and running "top". Then when it starts grinding, keep the window in view. By the time it's unresponsive, note down what the top several processes are. (I have several specific ideas about what might be causing this, but knowing the output of "top" would seriously help me narrow this down.) Also, you may want to try booting with "elevator=as" and see if that helps responsiveness. (It could also make the situation worse not better, but it's worth trying.)
Last time this happened I sshed in and ran top, as I recall the big 3 were rpmq (?), X, and top. I can check again tonight to be sure. I'll also try the elevator=as option.
it's definitely rpmq: top - 00:05:18 up 1:13, 2 users, load average: 11.40, 6.52, 2.85 Tasks: 80 total, 2 running, 78 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.3% us, 3.3% sy, 0.7% ni, 0.0% id, 95.3% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 256600k total, 253988k used, 2612k free, 160k buffers Swap: 718192k total, 299812k used, 418380k free, 7976k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3724 root 34 19 445m 192m 7168 D 3.3 77.0 0:20.27 rpmq 9 root 15 0 0 0 0 D 1.0 0.0 0:01.18 kswapd0 2913 alex 17 0 20252 2424 17m S 0.3 0.9 0:05.72 battstat-applet 1 root 16 0 2800 68 1316 S 0.0 0.0 0:05.10 init 2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0 3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.09 events/0 4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd/0 6 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper 5 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd 10 root 11 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0 114 root 19 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod 153 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.09 kjournald 1115 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 kjournald 1377 root 15 0 2688 168 1232 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 cpuspeed 1576 root 16 0 2920 4 1236 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 netplugd 1586 root 15 0 2064 72 1296 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 syslogd 1590 root 16 0 1872 4 1244 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 klogd it stay consistently at the top and occasionally spikes to 20-30% CPU. 3724 root 34 19 497m 193m 7168 D 2.3 77.3 0:26.14 rpmq 9 root 15 0 0 0 0 D 0.7 0.0 0:01.68 kswapd0 3745 alex 16 0 8800 284 6836 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.13 sshd 3777 alex 16 0 2756 820 1620 R 0.3 0.3 0:00.67 top 3724 root 35 19 477m 122m 7168 R 53.2 48.8 0:27.75 rpmq 3777 alex 16 0 2756 820 1620 R 0.3 0.3 0:00.68 top 1 root 16 0 2800 68 1316 S 0.0 0.0 0:05.10 init 2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0 3724 root 35 19 477m 193m 7168 D 3.0 77.1 0:28.34 rpmq 2913 alex 16 0 20252 2484 17m S 0.7 1.0 0:05.93 battstat-applet 3777 alex 16 0 2756 820 1620 R 0.7 0.3 0:00.74 top 3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:00.10 events/0 etc. I haven't gotten a chance to try the elevator=as option. What is rpmq?
"kill -9"ing the rpmq process (plain kill doesn't work) returns the computer to a useable state. What is rpmq and why does it go nuts on my computer?
(Sorry I didn't respond earlier, I've been busy) rpmq is what performs rpm queries (e.g. when you run "rpm -q name-of-package" or "rpm -qa" or whatever) There's a cron script at /etc/cron.daily/rpm that, once a day, lists all of the packages installed on your computer, sorts the list, and writes it to a log file. (BTW, after you kill -9 it, it would be a good idea to reboot in case the RPM locks are left in a bad state. If you don't, rpm or anything that updates/installs/removes/queries packages could freeze up later.) You could try "chmod a-x /etc/cron.daily/rpm" to disable the script. I'm not sure that's really a fix per se, but at least your computer will be usable for now.
re-assigning to rpm component.
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
Closing per previous comment.