linux/SMP/arla difficulties

[Dave Morrison]

Dear arla-drinkers,

We have a bunch on Dell dual PII boxes that are running linux-2.1.116 (yes, I
know, yesterday's technology) and arla-0.9.  Well, they're sort of running -
they're a bit unstable and the instability seems to be correlated with arla's
presence.  Here are a few symptoms that may or may not be related:

o once arla is up and running, the system crashes after anywhere from a few
minutes to a few hours - no obvious correlation with AFS activity. 

o before the machine finally hangs, tons of messages appear of the form "sending
wakeup: ..." (which are apparently generated in xfs).

o during this same time, arla goes nonlinear and chews up all the CPU

o when arlad is first started (using the startarla script), the sysname can't be
changed successfully for at least a minute.

o this same machine appears to be stable if arla is not started

Other oddments:

o arla was built with -D__SMP__ (same behavior when built without this)

o this version of kernel and arla runs happily together on a bunch of quad PPro
boxes we also have

Is anyone else experiencing similar problems?  Does anyone have suggestions
that'd help with this situation?  Is there some additional info that I could
gather that could help diagnose things?  

Thanks,
Dave

-- 
David Morrison  Brookhaven National Laboratory  phone: 516-344-5840
                Physics Department, Bldg 510 C    fax: 516-344-3253
		          Upton, NY 11973-5000  email: dave at bnl.gov