Hi all, thanks for all your help. I'll try to reply to everything, but first let me annouce the issue is now resolved and gentoo was not at fault.
The virtual HD is physically on a raid (unknown config). Mark, the sector size issue you mention, does it have to do with aligning real HD sectors with filesystem sectors (so that stuff like read-ahead will get no-more-no-less than what the kernel wants)? I've read about this kind of setup when I was interested in RAID long ago... Now that I know my hd is actually on a raid, maybe i could benefit some I/O performance improvements by tuning this a bit! Anyway, I was told by the support team that another user on the same physical machine (remember it's a xen VPS) was doing I/O intensive stuff which could have "I/O starved" my system. I don't understand how starving or even doing some kind of DoS attack could lead to a complete freeze on the console, but eh... They offered to migrate my system to another physical machine, and after that... I was able to perform a complete 'emerge -e system' in one shot without a scratch, I even did it with --jobs=2 and MAKEOPTS="-j4". After that, I started a complete "emerge --keep-going --jobs=2 world" with MAKEOPTS="-j8"... (i got 4 cores: dual xeon 2Ghz) This last emerge is still going on as I write this and is emerging pkg 522 of 620 !! And there were no build errors so far... It's emerging glibc at the moment, so once the big emerge is finished, I'll probably recompile all pkgs that depend on glibc. I believe glibc was actually updated during my very initial update on monday and I haven't come to do that... but I guess everything will go smoothly from here. Thanks again for all your help guys! Simon On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Jacob Todd <jaketodd...@gmail.com> wrote: > What do you have MAKEOPTS set to? >
