[WBEL-users] Kernel Upgrade to 2.6 series

[Charles Stevenson]

Hi all,

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 02:20:26AM -0600, James Knowles wrote:
> There are some noticable differences. Under heavy IDE disk load, I 
> notice the unresponsiveness typical to the 2.4 kernel, but it's *not* 
> nearly as bad as a raw 2.4 kernel. I'll be doing more testing over the 
> next couple of days, but overall I'm pretty impressed about the 
> improvements.

I know we ran into a similar problem under heavy disk I/O. I found that
RH patched the kernel VM to be less aggressive in cleaning dirty pages.
You can make the kernel stable again by setting
vm.inactive_clean_percent = 100 which is default upstream kernel
behavior. Originally in RHEL it was set to 5% which caused the OOM
killer to go nuts and kill off all the processes. I believe now they're
moving to 30%, however, I still do not see the benefit of this extra
factor they've added. Anyone else familiar with the reasoning behind it?

Regards,
Charlie

-- 
 Charles Stevenson <cstevenson@atipa.com>
 HPC Linux Engineer/Atipa Technologies
 Tel: (785)841-9559 ext. 3116
 Fax: (785)841-1809