Arch Linux

earlz

Member

Registered: 2010-07-11

Posts: 39

Random stalls caused by khugepaged?

I have a fairly beefy Arch Linux computer, kernel 3.7.7-1-ARCH. However, recently it's been having random freeze ups. Never common, but it'd freeze for a good 15 seconds where no program is responsive. Sometimes the mouse freezes with it and the cursor doesn't move. After this happens, it'll usually happen 2 or 3 more times until I decide to just restart my computer.

It just happened again a few minutes ago and this time I traced it using top. Whenever my computer would freeze, khugepaged CPU usage would randomly rise to 100%.

I run VMWare with 7 gigs of RAM assigned to it, however, my computer has 16G of RAM. When this last freeze up happened, I had 6G of RAM free. To give an idea, heres the header of top

KiB Mem:  16394208 total, 10194584 used,  6199624 free,        4 buffers
KiB Swap:  8388604 total,   103916 used,  8284688 free,  8788952 cached

I've seen some ways to disable khugepaged, but what bad effects could this cause? How can I just get it to behave better?

Typical mem info:

MemTotal:       16394208 kB
MemFree:         6542844 kB
Buffers:               4 kB
Cached:          8754308 kB
SwapCached:        21064 kB
Active:          1670140 kB
Inactive:        7846864 kB
Active(anon):    1408516 kB
Inactive(anon):  6826872 kB
Active(file):     261624 kB
Inactive(file):  1019992 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:       8388604 kB
SwapFree:        8293100 kB
Dirty:               116 kB
Writeback:           128 kB
AnonPages:        747680 kB
Mapped:          7617588 kB
Shmem:           7472696 kB
Slab:              78080 kB
SReclaimable:      52504 kB
SUnreclaim:        25576 kB
KernelStack:        2344 kB
PageTables:        31188 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:    16585708 kB
Committed_AS:    9320348 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:      131256 kB
VmallocChunk:   34359570612 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
AnonHugePages:    358400 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
DirectMap4k:       10240 kB
DirectMap2M:    16726016 kB