I installed kernel 2.4.2 and while it works ok most of the time there were two occasions when computer (almost) froze, load being 100% and almost nothing worked for about an hor or more.
both times this high load attack happened I opened xv (the thumbs view) on a directory with large number of files (about 2000). I did the same thing using old (2.2.17) kernel and it never caused significant problems. even with 2.4.2 kernel it only happens rarely, other times it works... first time it happened the mouse still moved, very slowly and after about 30 min. I saw that the focus starts to move from one window to another (title bar of one window changed color) second time it happened I couldn't do anything but ping the machine (it responded immediately, but ssh did not work) and switch from VT to VT - the switching between VTs was fast and the text screen appeared immediately but I could not type anything (well, I could type but nothing appeared on the screen, no keyboard combination worked (not even ctrl-alt-del) except of alt-Fn). it looks like it's caused or at least triggered by xv but I am quite sure it wasn't updated since quite some time before it used to work (these two freezes just happened within last week or so), the binary has date May 12 2000. if it happens I cannot even run top (it took about 15 - 30 sec. for load to build up to the level when machine was completely unusable) to see where the time is spent - it might be kernel. the disk seems to be working most of the time but not constantly. as far as I can see the memory usage does not go up, only the load (that's what the gkrellm show while it works). something similar happened before with netscape (one of those extra bad builds around version 4.0x), at that time I only had 16MB RAM so it wasn't hard to choke the system, but it woke up (killed netscape) eventually (it took few hours). however this time most of the software is the same as it was before I installed 2.4.2 I didn't find any suspicious messages in syslog or messages... any ideas on what's going on? system: debian testing, kernel 2.4.2, X 4.0.2, pentium 1GHz, 128MB RAM, plenty of disk space (MB, RAM and processor are new so it might be HW problem) TIA erik