[Haifux] Login console freezes: Eli's weekly riddle

[Eli Billauer]

Hello,


The alert reader may have noticed that I've upgraded to 2.6.36. Which 
has caused a weird behavior with Fedora 12.


I should start with sating, that after a couple of minutes, all weird 
things described below are over and forgotten, and everything runs as a 
clockwork. So let's see what happens immediately after bootup.


The login screen appears and is responsive. I click my own user, and 
it's fine, but when I type the first character of my password, the GUI 
freezes for several seconds, and then becomes normal until I press 
another key on the keyboard. And so forth.


While this is going on, logging in from ssh or a text console is 
extremely slow. In particular, when trying to ssh to the host, the 
prompt for password appears immediately (server is alive and kicking), 
but after entering the password it can take a minute or so until the 
login actually occurs (looks like someone holding some kind of lock?).


Another interesting thing is, that if I log in first, and then get the 
GUI login stuck, I see the following while the GUI is frozen:

(1) CPU usage remains idle.

(2) A stupid echo loop in bash runs as fast as it normally does (no I/O 
issues, and CPU is free to run)

(3) No special process jumps high on the "top" application.


Any ideas? Any cool logfiles to look at, except for /var/log/{messages, 
gdm/*}?


Thanks,

   Eli

-- 
Web: http://www.billauer.co.il