Since 2.2.x kernel, I'm (and it seems others too) are experiencing an irritating
'/root busy' while shutting down the system.
I tracked the reason why and found a more generic problem.
Since 2.2, there often happen to have processes in an 'unkillabe' state, waiting
for I/O usually on Unix sockets. This I/O never comes, so the root FS will be busy
forever.
Why don't those processes have a slice when they get the KILL signal, so they could
cancel the IO and gracefully exit ? I though that when you do a read and a signal
(caught or not) is receive, the I/O was cancelled and the read returns EINTR. Or
would it mean that the read has already got some input, so it is no more subject
to signals ? What to investigate next ?
This is really annoying, the only turn around I found is to sync the filesystems
just before the final shutdown step, but if it preserves data integrity, it still
takes the (looooooooong) e2fsck time at reboot.
Any ideas ?
François Désarménien
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