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    SubjectRe: Processes spinning forever, apparently in lock_timer_base()?
    On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:08:08 +0200 Matthias Hensler <matthias@wspse.de> wrote:

    > On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 03:36:54PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
    > > That's all a bit crappy if the wrong races happen and some other task
    > > is somehow exceeding the dirty limits each time this task polls them.
    > > Seems unlikely that such a condition would persist forever.
    >
    > How exactly do you define forever? It looks to me, that this condition
    > never resolves on its own, at least not in a window of several hours
    > (the system used to get stuck around 3am and was normally rebooted
    > between 7am and 8am, so at least hours are not enough to have the problem
    > resolve on its own).

    That's forever.

    > > So the question is, why do we have large amounts of dirty pages for
    > > one disk which appear to be sitting there not getting written?
    >
    > Unfortunately I have no idea. The full stacktrace for all processes was
    > attached to the original bugreport, maybe that can give a clue to that.
    >
    > > Do we know if there's any writeout at all happening when the system is
    > > in this state?
    >
    > Not sure about that. The system is responsible on a still open SSH
    > session, allowing several tasks still to be executed. However, that SSH
    > session gets stuck very fast if the wrong commands are executed. New
    > logins are not possible (Connection is akzepted but resulting in a
    > timeout 60 seconds later, so most likely /bin/login is not able to log
    > into wtmp).
    >
    > From all that I suspect that there is no more write activity on that
    > system, but cannot say for sure.

    Easiest would be to run `vmstat 1' in a separate ssh session then just
    leave it running.

    > > Did anyone try running /bin/sync when the system is in this state?
    >
    > I did not, no.

    Would be interesting if poss, please.
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