Re: fun ?

From: Roy C. Bixler (rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 11 2000 - 15:34:33 EST


On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, octave klaba wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > > upgrading from 2.2.16 to 2.2.17 a raid-soft config (adaptec 5x36Go)
> > >
> > > /sbin/lilo gave a D process ( :) )
> > >
> > > root 14823 0.0 0.1 1184 496 ? D Sep10 0:00 /sbin/lilo
> > >
> > > one question:
> > > reboot or not to reboot ?
> > >
> > > I have no flopy disk on this server.
> >
> > Could you please see where lilo is sleeping?
> >
> > You can do this with: ps xeo "command wchan" | grep lilo
> >
> > Note that System.map must be in the correct place.
>
> Another thing: are you using stock raid or 0.90?

Ooh, this seems familiar. My configuration is very similar to the one
mentioned above (with Adaptec controller, driver is AIC7xxx) and I have
seem this problem of LILO hanging with RAID 0.90. This was after the
'popper' got stuck in the R state as an unkillable process and 'kupdate'
and 'kswapd' were stuck in the D state. I originally ran 2.2.17 with
stock RAID and the same thing happened with the 'popper' daemon there
although I did not try LILO that time.

Well, the machine with the problem is a production server and I have
reverted to 2.2.16 with RAID 0.90. All is well there so far and,
hopefully, I can have the same stability as I had with 2.2.16 + stock
RAID. I can't help with any further debugging but, both times the
'popper' and 'kupdate' got stuck, it was a result of a user with a large
mailbox connecting. The 'popper' copies the mailbox over to a temporary
file on the same RAID partition (/var), so a guess would be this burst of
heavy I/O might be a trigger. I would like to know if there is a patch to
fix this so I could reconsider upgrading from 2.2.16.

Thanks,

-- 
Roy Bixler
The University of Chicago Press
rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu

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