Re: uninterruptible sleep lockups

[Anthony DiSante <theant@nodivisions.com>]

Denis Vlasenko wrote:
>>>The infrastructure for that does not exist, so instead, the "killed" 
>>>process remains. Not all of it, but at least the memory pinned down by 
>>>the io request.  This overhead is typically small, and the overehad of 
>>>adding forced io abort to every driver might
>>>be larger than a handful of stuck processes.  It looks ugly, but perhaps 
>>>a ps flag that hides the ugly processes is enough.
>>
>>I don't care about any overhead associated with stuck processes, nor do I 
>>care that they look ugly in the ps output.  What I care about is the fact 
>>that at least once a week on multiple systems with different hardware, some 
>>HW-related driver/process gets stuck, then immediately cascades its 
>>stuckness up to udevd or hald, and then I can't use any of my hardware 
>>anymore until I reboot.
> 
> 
> This was discussed to death before. There will never be a "D-state" killer. Period.
> 
> If you want to get rid of your stuck processes, you need to fix the bug
> or at least let lkml people know about it (this was already explained to you!).

I didn't mention any of that here; my reply was simply to correct Helge's 
misunderstanding about why I dislike stuck processes.  Regardless of whether 
the bugs get fixed or the kernel finds a way to work around them, my dislike 
has nothing to do with the overhead or "ugliness" of stuck processes; I 
dislike them because they render my system useless for 75% of the things I 
use it for.

-Anthony DiSante
http://nodivisions.com/