OK, I don't post here often, but I thought I'd mention this. I know there have been several threads regarding this problem with the recent 2.3.99-pre kernels, however, I had never experienced them on my setup until now. I'll quickly go through the steps here.
Hardware: Dell Inspiron 5000, Intel 500 Mhz PIII, 256 MB RAM, 18G IBM Hard Drive, Xircom 10/100 CardBus Ethernet.
Linux Dist: Redhat 6.2
Typical Software: Netscape, AbiWord, VMware (running either Windows 2000 or Win 98 in VM), several terms, gcc, Gnome with Sawmill window manager, sometimes XMMS.
About two weeks ago (roughly) I decided to give the 2.3.99 kernels a whirl on this machine. I compiled 2.3.99-pre6 and rebooted and other than a few minor gotcha's (like a mount point for shm, pcmcia differences, etc) everything went without a hitch. I did notice that large disk reads/writes seemed slower and I had periods of time where the mouse would hang slightly, usually during an initial load of VMware with Windows 2000 (with 96 MB allocated to the VM). The performance of hdparm -Tt saw buffer-cache reads to be about 20% slower than 2.2.14, but buffered disk reads to be almost identical (with the same settings, DMA enabled, etc.). I saw other talk about the kswapd problem, but this didn't show up on my system.
Then I decided to be really brave and try a 2.3.99-pre7-1. This actually improved response, VMware had never worked better. Restores of 96 Meg Vmware sessions took only seconds and drive IO seemed snappy while the mouse only occasionally stuttered.
So this weekend I had a few spare moments and decided to give 2.3.99-pre7-6 a shot. Well now the kswapd bug has bitten. Restoring the same 96 Meg Vmware session that returns in seconds under pre7-1 takes ~30 seconds in pre7-6, and even after it becomes somewhat usable the drive is cycling through periods of write to disk/pause for over a minute, all the while kswapd is at 99% CPU.
I haven't tried going back through each pre7-x release, but I could if that would help. I can provide more detailed information to anyone who would want it. This is mainly an informational post just hoping it might help in nailing this problem but I will gladly try any patches/suggestions.
For now I've gone back to pre7-1 as it works wonderfully.
Later,
Tom
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