# Lockup on heavy IO

## ikke

Hija,

I got a terribly annoying problem here with my machine. It locks up whenever I do a lot of hard-drive IO.

It is not a "new" problem, happens since I got this machine from my dad and removed his Windows in favor of Gentoo. First I used the ATA driver for my chipset (piix), so I got DMA on my hard-drive's IDE channel. When I started to notice the hangups, I dropped the specific driver and only started using the generic IDE driver. This one hangs my machine too, but after a longer period (as if it hangs after a specific number of bytes is read/written).

It happens at irregular intervals: sometimes I can untar a 100Mb tar.gz and do even more, sometimes it hangs while emerging something as small as, say, gaim. 

It is really annoying as when it hangs, I can only use the magic SysRq, although sometimes that doesnt help/work either.

I never saw any kernel oops, as normally I work in X, and when the machine hangs, I cant switch to tty12 (where syslog-ng dumps its messages).

At first I suspected inotify, which I used long before it was in -mm. Removing that patch from my kernel tree doesnt help though.

I really don't know what's causing this. Is it a software issue? My IDE controller? My hard drive? RAM? The machine does pass an extensive memtest86+ testrun.

I hate these lockups, not because of the time I loose, but mostly because when I reboot, my gaim buddies.xml is screwed, my firefox cookies,...

I'm running this setup:

- P4 1.9Ghz, 256Mb RAMBUS RAM

- hda: MAXTOR 6L040J2

- I'm running an LVM2 system (everything except /boot and /), using XFS on all LVM volumes. I don't think it is XFS related though, as it also happens when I create a test ext3 volume and untar something in there.

- IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801BA IDE U100 (rev 04)

Is there anything I can use to figure out what's causing this, some test tool,... Or is it possible to capture kernel oops messages somehow? (if at least I get an oops).

I'd really like to get rid of this. If it's just my harddrive, I can replace that one. Software problems can be fixed too, but I can hardly replace my IDE controller  :Wink: 

Thanks!

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## potatoface

the only thing that comes to my mind is that your /tmp partition is too small, so that it gets full when you untar a file.

i hope i could help you.

post again if it didnt solve the problem.

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## ikke

This doe not only happen when untarring something, sorry for the confusion, but also eg if I open a really large audio file (liveset) or so.

Even if /tmp is too small, the machine shouldnt hardlock, right?

```
/dev/mapper/nvg-tmp    1043776    881744    162032  85% /tmp
```

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## ikke

I was able to untar and remove the Xorg 6.8 tree 7 times in one session using the CLI version of 7zip under Windows, without any lockup, so this *must* be a software problem  :Sad: 

I'll try to untar it under Linux using several kernels (IO shedulers), on real partitions and LVM ones, using diffirent filesystems (used fat32 under windows),... to try to figure out what's causing this. Guess I'll better go back to LKML if I get some more info?

I ran memtest86+ again too, no errors after 2 hours (10 test rounds)

Thanks for all input,

Ikke

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