Re: CD-blanking leads to machine freeze with current -git [was: Re: CDwriting in future Linux try #2 [ was: Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirringup a hornets' nest) ]]

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 10 February 2006 15:12, Kyle Moffett wrote:
>On Feb 10, 2006, at 14:39, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Friday 10 February 2006 14:19, Phillip Susi wrote:
>>> Marc Koschewski wrote:
>>>> I just tried blanking a CD-RW with the latest -git tree. The
>>>> machine just became unresponsive and then froze. When it became
>>>> unresponsive the clock in GNOME still displayed the current time
>>>> but I could not focus any windows anymore. Then I had to hard
>>>> reboot the machine. The logs say nothing. I repeat: nothing.
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone have similar problems?
>>>
>>> Instead of rebooting, just wait for the blanking to finish.  My
>>> guess is that your burner and hard drive are both on the same ide
>>> channel, and so you can not access the disk while the burner is
>>> blanking.  If this is the case, put each drive on their own ide
>>> channel.
>>
>> It takes hard drive access to switch window focus? Yes, thats a
>> question.
>
>Depends on your programs and RAM.  If the program you try to switch
>to (or, say, part of X or your window manage) is swapped out for some
>reason, then yes, changing focus may cause said program to hang until
>it can swap the data in.  Usually that's a small fraction of a
>second, but if your IDE bus is waiting for a burn, then it could be
>the duration of the burn.
>
>Cheers,
>Kyle Moffett
>
Entirely possible I suppose, but I've seen it here quite a few times 
when there was no swap involved, I've a gig of ram, so I would, just on 
the evidence, have to assume something went gaga and its time to hit 
the reset button.  cd blanking here is a just a few seconds operation 
generally as I don't normally do the whole disk, thats a waste of time.

I've seen swap used here only one time since I rebuilt with a gig of ram 
nearly 2 years ago now.  Uptime about 2 days, memory according to htop 
is 384 megs used.

>--
>Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming
>   -- C.A.R. Hoare

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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