System becomes unstable when using ondemand cpu scaling governor on kernel. Typical scenario: power up, surf the net, read main, emerge stuff and crash. Typically X crashes without warning or system just reboots. This could happen at any time: while computer does nothing paticular or middle of, say, emerge process. Sometimes browser or mail client becomes really sticky and behave oddly before system hangs it self. My current kernel is 2.6.12-gentoo-r9 and I enabled ondemand governor by adding line "echo ondemand >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" to /etc/conf.d/local.start. I've seen exactly the same symptoms on other kernels (roughly 2.6.9 - 2.6.10) but on that time I just decided to stick with the default governor (performance) until now. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. power on 2. emerge stuff, surf net, read mail, watch a divx movie, etc. 3. system lockup/crash or processes start to misbehave and eventually system will die
Created attachment 66677 [details] Debug infromation from /var/log/kern.log The only useful error messages that I have managed to catch.
Created attachment 66678 [details] kernel config file
Created attachment 66679 [details] /etc/make.conf
So this *only* happens with the ondemand governor, no others? (You didn't include this in "Steps to reproduce") Can you reproduce this on the latest development kernel (currently vanilla-sources-2.6.13_rc6)?
Yes, this happens only when ondemand cpu scheduler is used. And yes, I can reproduce this on 2.6.13-rc7 vanilla. I didn't test 2.6.13-rc7 with performance governor to prove that the performance governor works. This because my regular uptime is +30 days. With ondemand governor the uptime is 1-4 hours.
Created attachment 66787 [details] Backtrace from 2.6.13-rc7
Please file a bug against 2.6.13-rc7 at http://bugzilla.kernel.org including the info that you have posted here. Please post the new bug URL here then I will keep an eye on it.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5133
fixed with recent kernel releases