2011/2/1 Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>:
>> When copying 4GB or more in one go from HDD to Flash, during the
>> copying, fork() and probably other syscalls involving VM start
>> blocking (I first observed the problem in Chrome, which refused to
>> display content in new tabs). When one lets the copying finish, the
>> system returns to a usable state.
>>
>> During the limbo, khugepaged is in D state (uninterruptible sleep).
>
> That means no hugepage could be allocated. Maybe memory compaction is
> doing an overwork because all pagecache is dirty and can't be
> migrated. This should solve it if it's memory compaction:
>
> echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
>
> kswapd state would be interesting too. Can you sysrq+t?

With -rc2, there is

$ ps aux | grep -E "kswap|khugep"
root       474  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    20:44   0:00 [kswapd0]
root       540  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        DN   20:44   0:00 [khugepaged]

Sysrq-t output is attached.

Good news is, I don't see these issues with -rc3.

Regards,
-- 
Jindrich Makovicka