Description of problem: - copy many files or big files between disks (usb to usb or internal to usb, for instance); - after a while, kswapd0 suddenly appears on top of processes, taking 100% of one CPU core; - computer starts slowly getting irresponsive (mouse lags, keyboard buffer, etc.) and totally freezes after a few minutes. I can reproduce it all the time. The issue has been reported upstream: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65201 It is said to be fixed in kernel 4.8, but I am on Fedora 24 up-to-date with kernel 4.8.6-201.fc24.x86_64. I have a Thinkpad T460 computer, Core i5 / Skylake architecture, 16 GB of RAM and a SSD. External drives are classic USB 3 hard drives. Of course, my computer does not swap at all as there is plenty of free memory. Was the patch included in the Fedora kernel? Any idea on how to debug this?
Created attachment 1221374 [details] dmesg during the issue
I found this happening last night when doing a system backup using rsync as the backup program. It prevented the backup from completing with exactly the same the symptoms described above: 'top' clearly showed the CPU used by kswapd0 rise steadily until it held ad 100% for several seconds, followed by a total system crash. This happened running Fedora 23 with kernel versions 4.8.10, so I rebooted into kernel 4.8.8 but it still ocurred at pretty much the same point in the backup run with the same symptoms being showed by 'top'. Finally, after rebooting into kernel 4.7.10 I was able to complete the backup. With this kernel I didn't notice kswapd0 CPU usage rising above 2%.
*********** MASS BUG UPDATE ************** We apologize for the inconvenience. There are a large number of bugs to go through and several of them have gone stale. Due to this, we are doing a mass bug update across all of the Fedora 24 kernel bugs. Fedora 25 has now been rebased to 4.10.9-100.fc24. Please test this kernel update (or newer) and let us know if you issue has been resolved or if it is still present with the newer kernel. If you have moved on to Fedora 26, and are still experiencing this issue, please change the version to Fedora 26. If you experience different issues, please open a new bug report for those.
I haven't seen this problem since upgrading to Fedora 25.
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Fedora 24 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2017-08-08. Fedora 24 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.