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Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 22:51:46 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Mark Watts <m.watts@eris.qinetiq.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: mke2fs -j goes nuts on 3Ware 8506-4LP
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Mark Watts <m.watts@eris.qinetiq.com> wrote:
>
> I have a 3Ware 8506-4LP controller with 4 250GB Maxtor SATA drives, in a 
>  raid-5 configuration (64K blocks)
>  System is:
>  Dual Opteron 246 (2GHz)
>  2GB RAM
>  Tyan S2875 motherboard
> 
>  Kernel: 2.6.8-rc2 (pre-empt is ON)
>  Rest of OS: Mandrake 10.0 AMD64 edition.
> 
>  When I execute a mke2fs -j /dev/sda7  to format a 600GB partition on the raid 
>  as ext3, the system slows to a crawl.

It's conceivably a memory reclaim problem.  Please try booting with the
boot command line option `mem=768M', then see if it goes any better.