No data in `w' and `top'

[Tim Haynes <kernel@stirfried.vegetable.org.uk>]

Hi,

As of kernel 2.4.5 I'm getting two symptoms:

 | bash$ w
 |  11:27:35 up 1 day, 21:24, 16 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.00
 | USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU  WHAT
 | bash$
(note lack of actual data)

and in top:

 |  11:42:22 up 1 day, 21:39, 12 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.04, 0.01
 | 0 processes: 0 sleeping, 0 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
 | CPU states:   0.2% user,   0.4% system,   0.0% nice,  99.4% idle
 | Mem:    188756K total,   175548K used,    13208K free,    26508K buffers
 | Swap:   257000K total,    19020K used,   237980K free,    98708K cached
 | 
 |   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 | 
 | 
 | 
 | 

(tends to 100.0% idle over time - refresh interval of 3s.)

In either case, this sits around for about 10s and then normal service is
resumed. During outages, the rest of the box behaves as normal.

I was informed this is due to a `locking issue' that only ReiserFS stumbled
upon (the above happened most times when I write to /home or /var/log, both
of which are ReiserFS), and that it was fixed in 2.4.6 (pre3). I'm now
running 2.4.7-pre3 and it *still* occurs, although not as frequently as
before (was roughly 2 out of every 3 writes to a reiser partition; now less
than predictable).

Data: Debian/Testing updated daily. Filesystems used:

    /dev/hda1 on / type xfs (rw)
    /dev/hda4 on /var/spool type xfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
    /dev/hda5 on /var type reiserfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime)
    /dev/hda7 on /usr/local type reiserfs (rw)
    /dev/hda8 on /home type reiserfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime)

If anyone else has experienced this and/or has clues what's going wrong,
I'd be grateful.

TIA,

~Tim
-- 
<http://spodzone.org.uk/>