Strange behaviour
I recently got a new laptop (Dell Inspiron 8200) and have installed testing
on it and set up pretty much everything as I like it. However I've run into
a problem that I haven't seen before which confounds all my attempts to sort
it out.
Basically, after a few days of uptime, it seems as though some processes
stop working correctly, not starting properly and also refuse to quit
or allow themselves to be killed. Specifically terminal windows (xterm,
rxvt) open, but do not run a shell, and XEmacs also hangs midway through
initialization. There are also numerous qmail-local processes stuck, but
which refuse to be killed. Also, any PCMCIA cards I have in the machine
work until they are ejected, but nothing happens when they are reinserted.
I am still able to log in fine from the console, and the affected processes
do not appear to be zombies, so I am at a loss as to what is going on under
the hood.
I compiled my own kernel (2.4.18) and tried some new options that I'd not
used before such as devfs, ext3, alsa and hotplug support so I'm wondering
if this could be a kernel problem. Anyone heard of something like this
happening before?
MBG
--
Matthew Guenther He who lives without folly is less wise
guentherm@asme.org than he believes.
http://www.attcanada.ca/~mguenthe/
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