My last crash, using 2.0.27 happened while i was reading mail with pine.
I got messages with: fork: try again. Any command would fail to fork,
and i wasn't logged in as root. I waited a couple of minutes but
watchdog (which I am assuming couldn't fork either) didn't do a cold
reboot.
In the past, we've had some problems with our ncr53c810, so I think
(though the logs dont show any trace of anything) that was the cause
this time as well (It didn't recover e2fscking our /tmp partition, and
I had to use a boot/root disk to e2fsck it manually before our server
would boot again).
If the scsi bus is totally locked up, will the kernel watchdog routines
still be effective? I can imagine it can't check the /dev/watchdog
device anymore, which is on a scsi disk.
Paul