Re: hung ttys

[Crispin Wellington <crispin@aeonline.net>]

On Sat, 2002-07-06 at 11:35, Forrest L Norvell wrote:
> 
> 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.

No great ideas. Just a suggestion. Is there any way to get a process
list. A ps aux should suffice. Are any processes is a 'process state' of
'D'. That is 'uninterruptible sleep'? Its not a solution, just a
direction you may want to try.

Crispin



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