QNX 6.5 freeze complete

Hello,
I have the following problem. I have a QNX 6.5 system which freezes regularly. The whole thing happens as follows.
First, the graphical user interface becomes sluggish, then the machine is still customizable but services like FTP or Telnet do not work anymore. Finally, the machine can no longer be pinged and must be restarted.
I can’t find any hints in the syslog.
Unfortunately I do not know where to start.
The QNX system is running as a virtual machine on an ESXi 7.0 from VMware.
I am grateful for every tip.
Many greetings

To things to try why the system is running. For both, it might help to set priority of a shell very high so you don’t get frozen out.

  1. hogs
  2. pidin. (look for processes that are in Ready mode

Hi,

@maschoen , how do you set the priority of a shell ?

Nicolas

You could use the nice command:

nice -n-10 sh

or the “on” command

I think there is an easier way. There was some command you enter to tell sh to set the priority of future commands. Then you run sh to put your sh at that priority. I’ll try to look it up when I have more time.

We use tinit in our sysinit file to spawn our login prompts and we spawn one with a high priority on con6.

Tim

P.S. How much control over your QNX machine do you have? Can you exit your application and/or the Photon GUI. Can you start a Photon shell etc. How long before it gets sluggish etc.

@maschoen, @Tim Thanks for your answer.
I’ve already had to investigate on overloaded system without success (top and hogs where outputting nothing). I didn’t think to run sh at higher priority. Good idea I’ll try next time. Thanks

This reminds me of another way to deal with this, though it could be a lot of trouble to set up. QNX 6.5 supports the partition scheduler. That would let you run a 2nd partition which would be guaranteed some amount of cpu. If nothing is running in that partition the cpu cycles aren’t wasted.

Unfortunately, I don’t think you can just start the partition schedule in a running system. I think you have to build it into the boot file so the OS starts with running.

I haven’t investigated partition scheduler. This is something I’d like to do but I lack some time for it.