From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Subject: Re: A couple of problems... Date: 24 Feb 1992 16:06:53 GMT
In article <1992Feb24.122225.2924@sbcs.sunysb.edu> kroe@sbstaff2.cs.sunysb.edu (KiYun Roe) writes:
>
>I think this hanging is easily the most serious deficiency in Linux,
>but I have made zero progress in identifying the cause. I hope Linus
>figures it out before he releases 0.13.
Yes, I think I've got it licked: it was /both/ a memory problem and a
filesystem problem. No wonder people have had hangups. Due to the
bugs, 0.13 might be a bit late, but I still expect it to be out about
March 5th or so..
The filesystem problem gets much worse when writing out the buffer-cache
to disk (several requests in the request-queue), and is especially
noticeable on slow devices (floppies and old drives). Writing big files
out to floppy is one of the ways you /might/ hang linux currently, but
it depends on a lot of factors. 0.13 will definitely have these bugs
corrected, I just hope there aren't other ones... Other than that 0.13
will be a relatively simple release: not very much new features, mostly
bug-fixes and kernel enhancements.
Re: system call overlapping - yes some of the system calls overlap, and
could be removed, but it's a real pain to recompile everything: I did
that when I implemented sigactions, and removed the old signal() system
call, and it wasn't fun. Not for the faint-of-hearted.
Linus