kupdated, bdflush and kjournald stuck in D state on RAID1 device (deadlock?)

David Rees
2001-08-29T20:17:32Z

(Sent to linux-raid, linux-kernel and ext3-users since I'm not sure what type of issue
this is)

I've got a test system here running Redhat 7.1 + stock 2.4.9 with these
patches:

http://www.fys.uio.no/~trondmy/src/2.4.9/linux-2.4.9-NFS_ALL.dif
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/ext3-2.4-0.9.6-249.gz
http://domsch.com/linux/aacraid/linux-2.4.9-aacraid-20010816.patch

All three patches applied without any problems.

I've got a RAID1 device running over two IDE drives on a Promise controller.
ext3 is the filesystem on the partition. In this machine, the aacraid
driver isn't enabled.

The machine is to be used as a development database server running Sybase
11.9.2. Shortly after installing Sybase and loading some data, I noticed
this:

[sybase@zorro ~]$ uptime
1:01pm up 1 day, 18:29, 3 users, load average: 3.00, 3.00, 2.91
[sybase@zorro ~]$ ps aux | head -15
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 1368 72 ? S Aug27 0:05 init [3]
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Aug27 0:00 [keventd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SWN Aug27 0:00 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Aug27 0:03 [kswapd]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Aug27 0:00 [kreclaimd]
root 6 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? DW Aug27 0:00 [bdflush]
root 7 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? DW Aug27 0:00 [kupdated]
root 9 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW< Aug27 0:00 [mdrecoveryd]
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW< Aug27 0:00 [raid1d]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Aug27 0:02 [kjournald]
root 130 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Aug27 0:00 [kjournald]
root 131 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? DW Aug27 0:01 [kjournald]
root 374 0.0 0.0 1428 176 ? S Aug27 0:00 syslogd -m 0
root 379 0.0 0.0 1984 396 ? S Aug27 0:00 klogd -2
[sybase@zorro ~]$

As you can see, bdflush, kupdated and kjournald appear to be deadlocked.

How can I debug this problem and find out who's the problem? I will try
rebooting and to see if the problem returns. If it does, it's back to ext2
for me on this partition, I guess. It seems like it could be a ext3
issue to me...

If there's any more information I can get, let me know. I'll leave the
machine like this for a while before I reboot it.

Thanks,
-Dave