Kernel 3.11 is starting to live its life...

[slickymaster]

Auto-resize Guest Display of my VM is back in business, just had to rebuild VirtualBox Guest Additions. Everything is running smoothly.

[synaptix]

Though I'm not using the 13.10 alpha 1 anymore and went back to xubuntu 13.04, I'm currently using the 3.11-rc1 kernel and it's working absolutely perfectly here, no problems or issues at all.

[VinDSL]

I accidentally booted into 3.11 this morning.

Didn't realize it for about a half-hour, when I closed Chromium & opened Firefox. Hard-locked again.

Back to 3.10.1...

[synaptix]

I accidentally booted into 3.11 this morning.

Didn't realize it for about a half-hour, when I closed Chromium & opened Firefox. Hard-locked again.

Back to 3.10.1...

New rc kernel must not like your hardware or something, lol.

[VinDSL]

New rc kernel must not like your hardware or something, lol.

I'm starting to think it's memory-related.

Linux will generally put up with a lot of hardware nonsense, but it's V picky about memory.

I run Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM, with little twinkly LEDs all over them, which change colors/brightness/speed et cetera with any RAM activity.

When 3.11 hard-locks, those LEDS are dead as a hammer -- no activity whatsoever...

BTW, been on 3.10 for 6 hours with no probs...

[synaptix]

I'm starting to think it's memory-related.

Linux will generally put up with a lot of hardware nonsense, but it's V picky about memory.

I run Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM, with little twinkly LEDs all over them, which change colors/brightness/speed et cetera with any RAM activity.

When 3.11 hard-locks, those LEDS are dead as a hammer -- no activity whatsoever...

BTW, been on 3.10 for 6 hours with no probs...

Interesting. I'm using the stock RAM sticks that came with my tower, so have no idea who the manufacterer is. Been running on rc1 since it came out and been running it against Xubuntu 13.04 without issues.

Lucky me I suppose.

[VinDSL]

They might have pulled something from 3.11-rc1 that this machine needs (or failed to include it). Who knows?

If worse_comes_to_worse, I'll compile it later (takes hours on this machine). It's still V early in the cycle.

I'm surprised any rc1 build works. Many times they don't, on this box LoL!

[VinDSL]

I'm starting to think it's memory-related.

Er... Excuse me for quoting myself, but...

I was doing a little digging, and ran across this:

SOURCE: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTQwODI

Zswap is a feature for the Linux kernel that provides compressed swap caching. It's been in development for a long time and was finally merged into the mainline Linux kernel for the 3.11 release.

Making the Linux 3.11 kernel an even more exciting release was the merger on Wednesday of the Zswap support. Per the Linux kernel documentation, "Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. zswap basically trades CPU cycles for potentially reduced swap I/O. This trade-off can also result in a significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are faster than reads from a swap device." [...]

The merge to mainline of Zswap happened with this commit. "Zswap is a thin backend for frontswap that takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them and store them in a RAM-based memory pool."

I *think* I found the culprit...

[Doug S]

For some continuing work on another thread, I have been keeping up to date with the various 3.10RC kernels, and now 3.11RC1. There are a significant number of kernel configuration changes between the final 3.10 and 3.11RC1, so I decided to load the ubuntu 3.11RC1 just to get the ubuntu version of the kernel config. However, when trying to compile the kernel with that configuration, it takes much much longer than normal and ends up absolutely enormous. I guess I'll go back to the config I was using (basically, the 3.10 one with defaults accepted for the new stuff), and then try again with 3.11RC2.

  .
  .
  .
  INSTALL include/sound (10 files)
  INSTALL include/video (3 files)
  INSTALL include/xen (2 files)
  INSTALL include/uapi (0 file)
  INSTALL include/asm (64 files)
dpkg-deb: building package `linux-firmware-image' in `../linux-firmware-image_3.11.0-rc1-u-24_amd64.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package `linux-headers-3.11.0-rc1-u' in `../linux-headers-3.11.0-rc1-u_3.11.0-rc1-u-24_amd64.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package `linux-libc-dev' in `../linux-libc-dev_3.11.0-rc1-u-24_amd64.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package `linux-image-3.11.0-rc1-u' in `../linux-image-3.11.0-rc1-u_3.11.0-rc1-u-24_amd64.deb'.

real    38m44.731s    <<< A compile should take about 15 mintes worst case
user    121m49.813s
sys     9m58.557s

doug@s15:~/temp-k-git-3.10rc4$ ls -l linux-image-3.11*
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug  46285246 Jul 16 15:26 linux-image-3.11.0-031100rc1-generic_3.11.0-031100rc1.201307141935_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug  49677592 Jul 15 09:12 linux-image-3.11.0-rc1+_3.11.0-rc1+-21_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug  49676560 Jul 16 09:08 linux-image-3.11.0-rc1-nohzn_3.11.0-rc1-nohzn-23_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug 731616634 Jul 16 16:29 linux-image-3.11.0-rc1-u_3.11.0-rc1-u-24_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug 731613260 Jul 16 16:58 linux-image-3.11.0-rc1-u_3.11.0-rc1-u-25_amd64.deb

Edit: I found the problem. For whatever reason debug info was being requested in the Ubuntu 3.11RC1 version.

-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug  51214734 Jul 16 17:38 linux-image-3.11.0-rc1-u_3.11.0-rc1-u-26_amd64.deb
doug@s15:~/temp-k-git-3.10rc4$ cd linux
doug@s15:~/temp-k-git-3.10rc4/linux$ diff .config .config.ubuntu
3c3
< # Linux/x86 3.11.0-rc1 Kernel Configuration
---
> # Linux/x86_64 3.11.0-031100rc1-generic Kernel Configuration
6772c6772,6773
< # CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO is not set
---
> CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y
> # CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_REDUCED is not set

[VinDSL]

[...] trying to compile the kernel with that configuration, it takes much much longer than normal and ends up absolutely enormous.

Yikes!

I'm envious of your time(s), but the size does seem enormous.

Well, I'm giving 3.11-rc1 another shot.

First try didn't last for 30 seconds before hard-locking. I misspelled "enabled" (left the 'd' off the end)

Second try has lasted 15 minutes, so far, after disabling Zswap in the kernel boot parameters.

See what happens...

EDIT

Okay, that's it. Lasted 49 minutes, this time.

I figured out a way to crash 3.11-rc1 every time, on this machine -- goto ->FB and play a Zynga flash game in Firefox. BooM! Repeatable time-after-after. LoL!

Patiently awaiting rc2...