Re: Unkillable processes stuck in "D" state running forever

[Federico Sevilla III <jijo@free.net.ph>]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 06:22:46PM +0800, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
> I have been noticing problems on two of my boxes here with some
> processes somehow getting stuck in "D" state, which cannot be killed
> even by a SIGKILL by root, and stay on running forever. I have noticed
> the problem, so far, on 2.4.18-xfs and 2.4.19-rc2-xfs kernels.

I do not know how small a tidbit this will be, but together with these
processes stuck in state "D", there is a continuing rise in the load
averages of the system as reported by various interfaces
(top/uptime/w/phpSysInfo). On the system running 2.4.18-xfs this rose to
up to 25 before I eventually rebooted the box.

Another bit: on the 2.4.18-xfs box, the number of processes getting
stuck in state "D" kept growing. Various `ps ax` and `sync` processes in
particular, would get stuck and stall as I would issue them. It may be
interesting to note that with 2.4.19-rc2-xfs, with which I had my "latest
encounter" with this problem, no `ps ax` or `sync` processes got stuck.
Only the couple of apt-method processes that got stuck (and any new ones
I would launch in an attempt to download a package from the Internet for
installation) were there.

Both units have already been upgraded to 2.4.19-rc3-xfs. I will send
feedback if/when I run into any processes stuck in state "D" for
abnormally long periods of time.

 --> Jijo

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