Processes in kernel mode count as running in the load average. At least,
that holds for other Unices so I suppose it holds here.
> 2) What on earth could the in.ntalkd's possibly have been waiting on in
> uninterruptible sleep that freed up when the bash process exited? Some
> weird tty layer thing?
Very likely. talk daemons going uninterruptible have affected us ever
since Ultrix was around and in Digital UNIX too: I'd wondered if it
was only a DEC thing :-/. I suspect the bug lies in the way ttys are
closed: the only programs which are likely to try to write to ttys in
strange states are talkd and shutdown (oh, and write but that's not as
heavily used). As you'd expect, we've seen problems with shutdown
hanging during its "wall" warning phase in Digital UNIX too.
--Malcolm
-- Malcolm Beattie <mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk> Unix Systems Programmer Oxford University Computing Services - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu