Re: System goes into complete hang

["Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc." <woods%planix.ca@localhost>]

On 7-Apr-08, at 11:38 AM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> Perhaps I wasn't clear.  The audio stutter is just the most obvious
> symptom.  The entire system goes dead for a moment approx. every
> 32.63157 seconds.  Playing music and tracking when it stops was how I
> worked out that number but everything goes dead.  I can't even get  
> caps
> lock to work for that moment.  In fact, it is exactly like a mini
> version of the problem that this thread is about.  I don't have to be
> playing music to see the problem.  It is much deeper than that.


That's a pretty "approximate" number that you've expressed as a value  
to the nearest 100,000'th of a second! :-)

Does it go on like that for "hours" at a time, always as regular as a  
clock?

How long is this "moment" that it's dead?

Are you running an Xserver on the console display when this happens?

Is the system keeping time reasonably well, especially without having  
ntpd running?


My Dell PE2650 with the Perc/3di RAID controller experiences weird  
pauses too, though not nearly so regularly, I don't think.  On that  
machine it seems to be the aac(4) driver that's missing an interrupt  
or something similar.  I set off a wee shell loop in /etc/rc.local to  
read from the raw device every 0.2 seconds in order to wake it up and  
keep things ticking along.  I think I've opened a PR about this problem.

--
                                        Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
                                        <woods%planix.ca@localhost>