On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 08:42 +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
[...]
Will try tests and post results

> Out of curiousity, what's the exact machine you are testing on
> because I want to see what sort of hardware combination triggers
> this problem? Is the tar local or is it copied over NFS? What is the
> configuration of the disk or partition you are copying to?

It's a Lenovo T420s with 2GB of memory.  It's core i5, so it has two
cores each with two threads, so it emulates a 4 cpu system.  It's
running Fedora 15 Beta, so the 2.6.38.4 kernel (although I've tried the
default 2.6.38.5 as well, since the fedora i915 updates are a bit
unstable).  I'm also booting 2.6.39-rc on it (with and without PREEMPT).
The standard Fedora config is SLUB.  Because it's FC15, it has all of
the cgroups stuff enabled for systemd.

Just in case, I've attached the FC15 config ... I modify it slightly for
2.6.39-rc but since the bug shows up in standard FC15, that should be
enough.

James