Description of problem: I enjoy kompiling kernels while doing other things in gnome on my PIII 650 with 512 mb of ram. Lately this activity has become all but impossible. The responsiveness for interactive work in phoebe is like it used to be around 2.4.0pre. As a datapoint i tried vanilla kernel.org 2.4.18, and there interactive responsiveness with that kernel is quite ok during kernel compile Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.20-2.2 i686 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. kompile a kenel (especially during make depend) 2. try to for example use mozilla 3. Actual results: the machine is almost grinding to a halt until the comiple finishes Expected results: better interactive repsonsiveness Additional info:
please try the rawhide kernel; we fixed some major interactive response stuff in there... please let me know how that one fares
I'm not sure that my rawhide mirror got the latest kernels, but when I try kernel-2.4.20-2.12 it is about as bad as the one shipping with phoebe. As a comparison i did a small test 1) packing up linux-2.4.20.tar.gz with tar 2) start 'make depend' 3) wait for 5 seconds to get the load up 4) switch workspace; reload a fastloading page in mozilla, switch to calendar view in evolution and switch back to a large imap folder. operation 4 takes about 10-15 seconds with kernel-2.4.18-19.8.0 (rh8 errata) but about a minute in both kernel-2.4.20-2.2 and kernel-2.4.20-2.12. During that time lots of klicks are lost and the system is generally very unresponsive. Do you need any more info?
unfortunately i cannot reproduce your problems on a similar (slightly weaker) testbox. could you try to run: "nice -n 19 make dep" instead of "make dep" - does that make interactivity much better? This is to make sure it's a scheduler related problem.
another thing, does the problem still trigger if you do: make depend >/dev/null 2>/dev/null sometimes the verbose output of 'make depend' loads the X server above a certain level (but this should really not be the case here - you had no problems with other kernels).
also, the 2.4.20-2.18 kernel should be available on rawhide, please try it - we made some scheduler related changes since 2.4.20-2.12.
2.4.20-2.18 feels much better, subjectively even better than 2.4.18-x. fyi nice -19 helped.
Could you retest the 2.4.20-2.21 kernel, without the nice -19 hack to make dep - is interactivity as good as you'd expect it to be?
Just tested 2.4.20-2.21 and it feels snappy. with or without 'nice -19' doesn't make any (noticeable) difference