Hi, and greetings to all on this lovely Monday morning. The temperature is 31C (expected to rise to 38C), relative humidity is 55% (expected to rise to 80%), and my advice is to drop all those plans of a picnic in Lodi Gardens and stick in your air-conditioned office while pretending to do work and drinking the free coffee/tea :)
Right, with that out of the way... My AMD64 desktop was on its last legs, so I got myself 1/2 a new system -- Intel DG31PR motherboard, 4GB RAM, Core 2 Duo at 2533 MHz, CoolerMaster cabinet. Being cheap, I cannibalised my old hard disks and SMPS. System booted up first shot with the old Debian kernel, and except that somehow eth0 had got renamed to eth1 (and X didn't work since it was configured for the old Radeon 7250 card), it just recognised everything out of the box. Amit Kalra, my hardware supplier, who had been anticipating a week-long odyssey of reconfiguration for the new hardware didn't say anything but I could tell by the way his eyes grew to twice their normal size as the system was booting that he was pretty damn impressed. When 10 minutes of reconfiguration got the 'net and the graphics too fixed, his eyes moved into Quad size mode :) Go on Winduhs, do that and show us! Now one of the things I'm facing is a slowdown of the system when it's doing disk-write-intensive activities. I believe this is because of the huge amount of RAM -- Linux buffers disk writes, and when it does start flushing the buffers to disk everything else freezes. Firefox, e.g. freezes for up to 20 seconds when the writes are in progress. I've played about with the disk scheduler and the buffering ratio (/sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler and /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio) and that seems to alleviate the problem a bit, but it's still there, albeit much less than before. On the other hand, I could be totally wrong about the cause of the problem, and this could be mere symptomatic treatment. So anyone have a clue as to why these freezes happen, or a better solution for fixing them? The disk is otherwise writing at about 60MB/s (which I presume is OK for a SATA). The other weird thing is the temperature sensors. CPU temperatures show up within limits (typically 55C plus/minus 5C), but two of the temperatures are way out of whack: AUX Temp: +127.0°C (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C) ALARM sensor = thermistor Sys Temp: +74.0°C (high = +17.0°C, hyst = +43.0°C) ALARM sensor = diode OK, the AUX is probably just some hardware or configuration glitch, since it's constant at 127C. However I'm a bit concerned about the Sys temperature -- should it be 70C+ ? Could it be a wrong reading, or do I need to do something to fix this? What /is/ the Sys temperature anyway? Any help, pointers appreciated. sensors output available on request. Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
