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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: I have 10 72GB 10000RPM drives connected via fibrechannel using software RAID on an 8-CPU Dell 8450 box with 4GB of RAM and plenty of internal hard disk space (>18GB). I setup 5 mirrors (sda1-sdf1, sdb1-sdg1, etc.), let their mirrors sync, then RAID0 them. End result is one 350GB md device. Then I run mke2fs on that 350GB device to create the filesystem. Around inode 250 or so, it begins to slow down. Around inode 430, it stops altogether. The machine isn't locked up, and it reports no CPU usage, no I/O usage across the FC drives. mke2fs is in an uninterruptible sleep state. This is a fresh RH7.2 install, no errata, no changes from a default installation. No errors appear in dmesg or /var/log/messages. mdstat reports no failures in the drives. I have another 8-CPU Compaq 8500, 4GB RAM, almost identical setup, with the same problem. This box is also RedHat 7.2 with all current (as of today) errata in place. I have the same problem with this machine, although this machine is in production on internal drives, so I can't test with it anymore. Furthermore, when I was testing with it, sometimes the freeze up would affect other I/O on the system, causing other programs to pause or hang. Machine 1 has a QLA2200 FC card Machine 2 has a QLA2300 FC card Syncing of the drives in both cases worked just fine. There were no pauses or hangups, so it's likely not a driver issue. I debated putting this under kernel, because it smells of a kernel issue, but the direct problem is related right now to mke2fs. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Setup machine. 2.Setup mirrors. 3.Run mke2fs Actual Results: mke2fs stops Expected Results: mke2fs finishes Additional info:
This has todo with kernel VM problems and newer kernels should work better with this. Thanks a lot, Florian La Roche