Re: uninterruptible sleep lockups

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 14:18:44 EST, Anthony DiSante said:

> It seems like this problem is always going to exist, because some hardware 
> and some drivers will always be buggy.  So shouldn't we have some sort of 
> watchdog higher up in the kernel, that watches for hung processes like this 
> and kills them?

And said watchdog would clean up the mess, how, exactly?  There's lots of sticky
issues having to do with breaking locks and possibly still-pending I/O (I once had
a tape drive complete an I/O 3 *days* after the request was sent - good thing no
watchdog killed the process and deallocated the memory that I/O landed in ;)

It's been covered before, look in the lkml archives for details.

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