Re: Lemote YeeLoong (LOONGSON) freezes during nightly maintenance operations

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2017, John D. Baker wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Jan 2017, David Holland wrote:

> > also, something that might be useful to test is to create a directory
> > tree the same size as the ext2fs ones using some other fs (e.g. tmpfs)
> > and see what happens if the find / scans that.
> > 
> > (same size == same tree depth and number of names/inodes)
> 
> Hmm.  That might be possible.  The big ext2fs filesystem holds complete
> trees for pkgsrc-HEAD and -current src, xsrc as well as OpenBSD src,
> xenocara, and ports, plus snapshot tar files.  Also home directories
> for local users, intended to be shared between all OSes on the machine.
> 
> So, traverse the file system and clone it by making directories and
> 'touch' dummy files somewhere else?  I'd have to do that under penguin-OS,
> tar up the result and plop it onto a tmpfs (or ffs).

I created a "dummy" file system according to the above procedure
(fortunately, there were only a handfull of symbolic links, so I created
those manually).  I tar'd it up and copied it to where I could get at it
on my file server.

I adjusted my YeeLoong's fstab so that "/tmp" was on tmpfs using up to
75% of RAM.  Also, all ext2fs file systems were commented out to prevent
them from being mounted.

Upon net-booting and mounting NFS root, I began extracting the dummy
file system layout to the tmpfs-managed "/tmp".  This operation froze
the machine not long thereafter.

So, perhaps this helps point to the problem?  Or perhaps I've added a
complication.  I compressed the tar file of the dummy file system with
"--xz", so perhaps the machine doesn't have enough RAM left to decompress?
It has plenty of swap space, otherwise I would expect it to report out
of memory and terminate 'tar', not hang.

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