Hello, I am experiencing a very similar problem with my laptop (AMD fusion based, HP Pavilion dm1-3101 - 4GB RAM, CPU AMD E350 dual core), a fresh Natty installation with updates and kernel 2.6.38-9-generic amd64. When trying to rsync a few GB directories from my main PC to the laptop, after a while (random) the laptop hangs. Nothing is displayed on screen and I cannot find any trace in the logs.
After some hours (sic!) spent on this problem, I have noticed that: - The system hangs when free memory gets low (monitored with 'top' on a terminal). - As free memory decreases, kswapd0 starts consuming more and more cpu time, till it reaches 60%-80%. Swap is not used however, and I was able to reproduce the hang even with swap off. - As a workaround, I eventually found that dropping the disk caches when kswapd0 starts misbehaving (echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) prevents the kernel from freezing and, thanks to that, I could finally complete the rsync. Do you think this is the same problem, or should I open a new bug? -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/755066 Title: heavy i/o on sandybridge systems with small memory footprints causes system hangs -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
