odd unionfs and disk accesses in 3.00

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shankargopal
Posts: 295
Joined: Sat 03 Dec 2005, 11:30

odd unionfs and disk accesses in 3.00

#1 Post by shankargopal »

I don't know if this is a bug or a problem with my configuration, hence posting it separately. I'm facing some odd problems with Puppy 3.

1. At least three times now I've had weird crashes where all programs in X freeze up. The mouse continues to work. When I shutdown X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, I find a message on the screen saying:

Code: Select all

unionfs: saving rdstate with cookie 2 [and some number]
No prompt appears, either on that terminal or on the other terminal (Ctrl Alt F2). If I try to reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I get the message "Puppy shutting down now..." and then nothing happens.

I'm running on a 1 GB LG flash drive with a 512 MB pup_save, mostly cleanly recreated for Puppy 3.00. I run with three SFS files mounted - pup_300, OpenOffice and one I made with most of my apps. My WM is E17, running off the last SFS file. This problem has occurred on two machines, both PIV or equivalents with 256 MB of RAM.

2. Maybe my next problem is beacuse of the large number of SFS files that are open, but I'm not sure. I get very long delays and sudden slowdowns very frequently which are accompanied by frantic accesses to the Flash drive and, if swap is running, continuous hard drive accesses too. This happens most of all when I'm trying to run Seamonkey and OpenOffice together. This problem used to occur on 2.17 as well, but much less frequently. I thought it was happening because I was using Firefox / Thunderbird in 2.17, so switched to Seamonkey in 3.00 but the problem has become a lot worse. In 3.00 this happens during practically every session. Running "top" seems to show, as expected, Seamonkey or OpenOffice at the top. Adding more swap through an additional swap file makes no difference to the slowdowns. I generally run with 256 MB RAM and a 200 MB swap partition or swap file.

Anyone have any ideas on this?

andrei
Posts: 80
Joined: Wed 31 May 2006, 23:56

#2 Post by andrei »

Perhaps you could try to revert to aufs, as I described in my post:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21336
Then, if your problems are gone, this would indicate that this is indeed unionfs-related.
I got some segmentation faults when trying to write directly to layers under unionfs, and weird messages on shutdown. This was my reason to go back to aufs.

shankargopal
Posts: 295
Joined: Sat 03 Dec 2005, 11:30

#3 Post by shankargopal »

Thanks a lot. Will give it a shot, andrei, and report back.

shankargopal
Posts: 295
Joined: Sat 03 Dec 2005, 11:30

#4 Post by shankargopal »

Ok, running in aufs and have run smpflush once too.

There's a very significant speed improvement. I'm running OO 2.2 and Seamonkey together just now and no slowdowns or disk thrashing yet (by now would almost certainly have started earlier). Won't know if the freezes happen, of course, until one does, since they pretty much seemed to happen randomly earlier - though ironically I had one when I tried to shutdown for rebooting with aufs.

So all in all seems to have fixed the problems. If a crash happens again, will post here.

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