BUSY

jlowell · 2003-10-17 01:10:47

I notice booting up that after the kernel is booted and the computer moves into the next phase of the sequence the BUSY indicator for activating the swap partition never changes to DONE as it does for every other step in the process . BUSY for activating swap just stays on until I reach the login prompt, after which I can't see what's happening anyway, of course. Shouldn't this indicator complete its sequence quickly or is activating swap a special case?

jlowell

hApy · 2003-10-17 05:30:05

Hmm.. well it's probably not this but I thought I'd mention it -- sometimes if the action has some output, it will print this output, moving the cursor down a line or two, then it prints [DONE] 2 lines down, where it would normally be over-writing the [BUSY] ....

That's just a guess since I don't think I've ever really seen any output from activating the swap.

Hapy.

zen_guerrilla · 2003-10-17 09:27:51

It takes less than 1 sec here (on 3 different boxes with different swap sizes). Is your swap partition ok ?
Try :

free | grep Swap

to check if swap gets enabled after all, if not :

$ swapoff /dev/hdXY 
$ swapon /dev/hdXY

(replacing XY with you swap location, eg /dev/hda2) and check the output of both commands.

Xentac · 2003-10-17 15:35:06

hApy's right. If you look at the line following the swapon output you'll see a coloured DONE, which would have overwritten the BUSY if swapon hadn't output anything.

apeiro · 2003-10-17 16:33:08

Yea, the lines get a little messy whenever the kernel wants to say anything. Once syslogd comes up, it speaks through there, but the earlier stages of rc.sysinit get outputted to /dev/console.

there are "fixes" for this, but they're not a high priority right now.

jlowell · 2003-10-17 18:20:51

apiero, zen_gorilla, Xentac. hApy,

Am I correct, then, to understand you as saying that for swap activization what I'm experiencing with the delay in BUSY going to DONE can be accounted for by the fact that the proper output is being sent to a file or directory and not the screen? If that's the case, I won't worry about things.

The same phenomenon is occuring on all three of my workstations. On the relevant drives I have one roughly 500 MB logical partition for swap which is used by Arch and a couple of other distros as well, depending, of course, on which one I boot. On the other end of the sequence, halting, rebooting, I see no such delay, swap deactivates BUSY to DONE in a flash.

Running

free | grep Swap

right after logging in, I get output

Swap: 514040 0 514040

Memory use by swap as monitored by gkrellm reports the same thing. I should conclude that there's nothing wrong with my machines, then? I just hope I'm understanding apiero properly. Am I?

jlowell

apeiro · 2003-10-17 21:58:24

Correct. Your swap partition is functioning fine.

Xentac · 2003-10-20 03:29:25

Yes. If you look really really really really closely, you'll see that the line below the output from swap (which should be a line or two below the BUSY line) it says DONE, in exactly the spot it would have if swapon hadn't output anything. That DONE is corresponding to the BUSY from the original line.

Arch Linux

#1 2003-10-17 01:10:47

BUSY

#2 2003-10-17 05:30:05

Re: BUSY

#3 2003-10-17 09:27:51

Re: BUSY

#4 2003-10-17 15:35:06

Re: BUSY

#5 2003-10-17 16:33:08

Re: BUSY

#6 2003-10-17 18:20:51

Re: BUSY

#7 2003-10-17 21:58:24

Re: BUSY

#8 2003-10-20 03:29:25

Re: BUSY

Board footer