Re: 2.0.30 goes nuts

Andrej Presern (andrejp@luz.fe.uni-lj.si)
Mon, 18 Aug 1997 23:23:53 +0200

Michael L. Galbraith wrote:
>
> On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Andrej Presern wrote:
>
> > 2.0.30 goes nuts. Filesystem becomes read-only (even though
> > mounted rw, which mount shows to be correct), LOTS of zombie
> > processes, processes that cannot be killed, machine accepts
> > telnets and seems to work but cannot be shut down via init
> > (shutdown -n did the job), load at 15 even though top shows
> > 95% free.
> >
> > Nothing in the logs. As a matter of fact, logs were not being
> > written any more from the moment fs went read only..
> >
> > Andrej
> >
>
> Are you using ipx or appletalk? I had runaway processes as you are describing
> in 2.1.45 with these in the kernel. My runaways were related to a /proc/net/dev
> problem.. are you seeing anything strange in /proc? The symptoms are identical
> with the exception that mine were net, and yours are fs.

No ipx nor appletalk. I have another machine at home that is setup
exactly like the one in question, the only difference is that this
one doesn't have an eth driver compiled in, and it runs reasonably
well. I have experienced some weird loadavgs which I have reported
already, but other than that it works. It is true though that this
machine is regularly being shut down, where the machine that freaked
out had some 25+ days uptime.

I think that the loadavg problem that I experienced in the past was
caused by the same bug that caused the crashed machine to have a
constant load of 14 to 15 while 'top' reported CPU to be 95% idle.
I don't know if the crash itself was directly related to the unusualy
high loadavg problem or not but IMHO those are two different problems.
I have observed both machines closely today and have noticed that
the one that crashed had a number of processes in brackets where the
other one had not (btw, what do the brackets around process names
mean?). When the machine crashed virtually all of the immortal
processes were enclosed in brackets (a lot of them were zombies).

I'll watch the machine to see if the situation repeats.

Andrej