hung ttys
Hi, and thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
I'm running sid on a ThinkPad 600E, and it's developed a really
irritating quirk recently. After the machine has been up for a few
hours (typically 5-10, with a couple suspensions to sleep thrown in
there), anything that requires access to ttys will cause the calling
process to hang. If I run 'w', it freezes after printing the banner,
and neither ctrl-c nor ctrl-\ (quit) will cause the process to return
control to the shell. If I try to spawn a new terminal window (I run
gnome-terminal 1.4.0.6 -- held because gnome-terminal 2.0 still has
some sucking left to do), zsh will run through the startup process
until it's time to present a prompt / snag a tty, and then it'll
freeze. 'pstree' will work but 'ps acux' will hang (again, after
printing the banner).
Should I have the chutzpah to try to kill a terminal window that's got
a hung process in it, all of my terminal windows will fail to redraw,
although (somewhat capriciously) the rest of the system (X, gkrellm,
xemacs, galeon) will remain responsive. If I try to log out of my X
session and get back to the GDM prompt, X hangs upon shutdown. If I
switch to one of the text consoles and hit ctrl-alt-del, the system
will follow the shutddown process until it tries to save my ALSA mixer
settings, at which point the entire system becomes unresponsive, and
neither love nor money will prevent the need for a hard reboot.
I update my system pretty regularly, but I have no idea what could
have caused this. I've noticed some pcmcia-cs (3.1.34) wackiness since
the most recent upgrade (sometimes on wakeup it won't recognize my
Ethernet card, and I have to eject and reinsert it to access the
network), but I don't know if that's related. I've got most of the
Gnome components held so that I'm not running Gnome 2.0, but Gnome
shouldn't be able to hose the kernel like that, should it? I'm running
kernel 2.4.19-pre8, and have been without incident since whenever
Marcelo released it.
Anyone else experienced this? Anyone have any ideas what might be
wrong, and (most usefully) how I might fix things?
Thanks.
Forrest
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