killing a process writing to a scsi drive freezes a system

From: hiren_mehta@agilent.com
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 13:17:12 EST


Hi List,

I tried to do dd to a bunch of scsi drives running in background.

e.g. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 &
     dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 &
     dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=1024 &

Then I tried to kill the first dd process writing to /dev/sdb
and it freezes up the system. When I looked at the drives,
I can see that every 1 second the lights on all the drives (not
just sdb) flashes. This goes on for quite long time. Looks like
after I issued the kill, the system is trying to flush its buffers.
I am running this on ia64 system which has 4GB of memory and it
takes lot of time to flush the buffers, because of delay of 1 second
between bunch of writes.

Can anybody tell what is going on here ? Is this is bug in the block
device driver ? If that the case, is it fixed in the lator versions
of kernel ? I am running 2.4.2 kernel.

I can switch between the vt's. But I cannot login from other vt's
until this flushing is done. Also, the current vt ( where I fired
all dd commands) and other vt's where I have already logged in,
are completely frozen and I cannot do anything after I issue the
kill command.

Regards,
-hiren

Regards,
-hiren
(408)970-3062
hiren_mehta@agilent.com
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 07 2001 - 21:00:10 EST