On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 04:48:56PM +0100, sigsegv@rambler.ru wrote:
> >I have experienced a few freezes running 2.0beta kernels.  A moment ago,
> >I was about to save an image from gimp and the system froze.  The X display
> >remained visible, but the mouse and keyboard were all dead (no caps lock
> >operation even).  I waited for some 15 minutes and the system didn't reboot
> >or recover.  All the time, I was able to ping the system from a remote
> >machine.
>
> I had similar problems, which were attributed to mounting filesytems 
> with softdep option. I did a simple test, downloaded a 40MB tar file 
> (e.g. mozilla.tar.gz) and then unpacked it many times over and over 
> again, sooner or later, the whole system would just freeze. Mounting all 
> my filesystems without softdep option made the problem go away. I am not 
> a kernel programmer, but from what I can see, softdep code in NetBSD may 
> have some serious bugs.

Hmm.  I tried saving an image from gimp again - system freeze.  Then I
disabled softdeps and sure enough, I was enable to save the image.

In both cases, I tried to save the the image to a remote disk (over NFS),
but /tmp (used by gimp) was a local disk with softdeps enabled.

On the other hand, I have been using softdeps for a long time and it
generally works just fine.  Maybe it's softdeps and NFS together or..

  -jm