[TriLUG] (no subject)

[Ian Meyer]

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Alright, I have an on-topic question here.

On some forums I am on, there are a number if irrational people that 
enjoy little more than to belittle Linux. One of them posted what you 
see below in an attempt to attack it.

I am just curious (a) if this is a widespread problem (which I doubt, 
since I haven't heard about it) and (b) if it is, what's the ETA for a 
patch?

Thanks
Ian

The quote:
"Here's how this works: if you have a disk with many writes and reads, 
the operating
system hasto queue these. If you have a big queue, or heavy load, the 
problem
appears when you have writes trying to happen before reads. The 
programs needing to
read will be stopped until the queue flushes. Or, if you don´t 
necessarily have a
big queue, the problem can appear from deadlock resulting from a 
process called
"kjournald" waiting for a system call when there is a particularly long 
write
request in the queue. So, all programs depending on the kjournald 
process begin to
wait for kjournald to commit its writes, which never really happens, 
and all
programs begin to cascade into an "uninterruptible sleep" state, and 
begin to stop.
In theory, if you wait, your system can return, but this can be a long 
wait with
significant downtime. None of us can wait, and the only solution is to 
reboot."


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