Re: [vserver] 4.9 Kernels Hit Psand Repos

From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert_at_13thfloor.at>
Date: Thu 20 Sep 2018 - 15:50:10 BST
Message-ID: <20180920145010.GG10258@MAIL.13thfloor.at>

Hello Andrew,

On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 12:23:06AM +1200, Andrew Ruthven wrote:
> I decided to try the latest 4.9 kernel again tonight and I
> tracked down the performance issue I was seeing. iostat was
> showing one hard drive with utterly terribly wait times, and
> even running smartctl against that drive was epically slow
> (all other drives ran normally).

> Turns out there was a dodgy SATA cable for that drive. After
> swapping the cable, I/O on the machine is back to what it
> should be!

Glad it could be resolved!

> At a guess something has changed in the SATA drivers between
> 4.1.x and 4.9.y and that change of behaviour triggered the
> issue I was observing.

Yeah, sometimes even subtle changes in the kernel have
huge impact on certain (especially problematic) hardware.

Best,
Herbert

> Ben, thank you for publishing your kernels!

> Cheers,
> Andrew

> On Mon, 2018-02-05 at 21:47 +1300, Andrew Ruthven wrote:
>> Hey,

>> Has anyone noticed big I/O issues with this kernel?

>> I ran it for a few days, and found that processes (even on the main
>> system) were often sitting in a D state, seemingly blocked on I/O.
>> But
>> there didn't seem to be much I/O happening. Even ssh'ing in to any
>> vservers or physical host was incredibly slow.

>> Cheers,
>> Andrew

>> On Tue, 2018-01-30 at 22:50 +0000, Ben Green wrote:
>>> Hi all,

>>> I've just finished and uploaded Linux kernel 4.9.78 with patch  
>>> vs2.3.9.6. They are installable directly from the psand.net  
>>> repository, or via the metapackage:

>>> linux-image-vserver-4.9-beng

>>> For i386 and amd64 architectures, and there's a version I've
>>> compiled  
>>> with gcc-8 which can be installed directly, or via the metapackage:

>>> linux-image-vserver-4.9-beng-reptoline

>>> That one is amd64 only of course. These images are only provided
>>> in  
>>> the Debian Stretch distro repositories. Instruction (which need a
>>> bit  
>>> of updating but should get you where you need to be) are at:

>>> https://www.psand.net/services/public-repository.html

>>> These kernels are minimally tested and as usual come with
>>> absolutely  
>>> no guarantees whatsoever.

>>> Cheers,
>>> Ben

> --
> Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand
> MIITP

> At work: andrew.ruthven@catalyst.net.nz
> At home: andrew@etc.gen.nz
> Cloud  : https://catalystcloud.nz
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Received on Thu Sep 20 15:41:37 2018

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