Re: 2.6.[45]-.*: weird behavior

[Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@polcom.net>]

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004, R. J. Wysocki wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> For quite some time I've been observing strange keyboard problems with the 
> kernels 2.6.4 and above.  Namely, in a GUI, the keyboard (which is a PS/2) 
> sometimes seems to get "locked" for some time (usually for a couple of 
> seconds) even if there's no any process running in the background (of course 
> there are some processes in the background but they are all sleeping).  By 
> saying "locked" I mean that the kernel does not seem to accept any keyboard 
> input whatsoever at that time, but after the kayboard gets "unclocked" it 
> properly passes all of the characters typed in the meantime to applications.
> 
> Moreover, it often takes more time to "unlock" the keyboard (up to 30 sec. or 
> so), in which case I can speed up the proccess by switchig windows with a 
> mouse (usually it is sufficient to switch once to another window, but 
> sometimes more window switching is necessary).
> 
> Some days ago I noticed that similar problem occured for example when I tried 
> to unpack the kernel source: the tar process had apparently been suspended 
> for several times for up to 10 sec., so it took more than approx. 3 min. to 
> unpack the source (usually it takes no more than 30 sec.).  There were not 
> any processes running in the background, though.
> 
> I noticed that this happened after updatedb had finished so I tried to 
> recreate this by running updatedb once again and than unpacking the kernel 
> once again and the problem reappeared.  I'd run top before and I found that 
> the CPUs were spending 90+ percent of the time on IO-wait (the system is a 
> dual AMD64 w/ NUMA w/o kernel preemption).  Strange.
> 
> I thought it was accidental (the kernel was 2.6.5-rc3-mm2), but yesterday I 
> noticed that the keyboard "locking" occured even more often after I had 
> installed the 2.6.5-rc3-mm4 kernel (it happened after the machine had been - 
> seemingly - idle for some time).  I ran top and that's what it showed me:
> 
> top - 23:14:39 up  3:21,  1 user,  load average: 1.24, 1.12, 1.05
> Tasks: 111 total,   1 running, 110 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):   0.5% user,   0.0% system,   0.0% nice,  50.0% idle,  49.5% IO-wait
> Mem:   1030060k total,  1000820k used,    29240k free,    18724k buffers
> Swap:  1050608k total,     3520k used,  1047088k free,    50168k cached
> 
> and it had been showing similar things for a minute or so, which is a kind of 
> weird, IMHO.  I mean, the only running process was the top itself, so I don't 
> get the 49.5% IO-wait.
> 
> Then I thought it was a NUMA-related issue but today I had the "keyboard 
> locking problem" on a Celeron (Coppermine)-based laptop running the 2.6.5-rc3 
> with exactly the same symptoms (apparantly, the kernel stopped accepting the 
> keyboard input or at least passing it to applications - I couldn't even 
> switch from X to a console - and then, when I closed some windows with a 
> mouse preparing the system for reboot, the keyboard got "unlocked" and it 
> started to work as usual).  So, there are two different (though a bit 
> similar) architectures affected, it seems.
> 
> Now, can you please tell me what may cause such a behavior?  I really would 
> like to narrow it, so please tell me what I can do for this purpose (I've no 
> idea whatsoever).

Hi,

Maybe you should make profile of the running kernel on both configurations 
to find what functions are called most often?

Can you attach config files for both the AMD64 and the laptop?

And can you reproduce this problem with 2.6.2-rc2-mm? or 2.6.2-mm? 
kernels? They are working for me and my friend well on all machines (with 
some minor issues) while >=2.6.4-mm? are broken on nearly all 
configurations (because of different, often unrelated reasons).


regards

Grzegorz Kulewski