Re: Repeatable hang with XFS under 2.6.11-rc4

[Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Peter,

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 12:49:45PM +1100, Peter Chubb wrote:
> Running Reaim-7 on a 4G ram disk with 4 processors on
> Itanium... Every few runs, as the multiprocessing level increases, we
> see 22 processes hung in sync(), all except one waiting in
> sync_filesystems() and that one waiting in pagebuf_iowait().

That would indicate either XFS dropped the IO completion for a
metadata buffer, or the driver didn't pass it back to us.  Hard
to say which; is this with default mkfs options?  If so, try
using -ssize=4k at mkfs time, that'll get rid of some of the
more unusual IO patterns which XFS can send down.  Also try a
blocksize the same as the pagesize (16K there I would guess).
If the behaviour changes, these'll give us pointers and help
isolate where the problem is.

cheers.

-- 
Nathan