Description of problem: It sometimes happens, that a process is in the system call exit(), is in status end (according to ps -o ...,wchan,...), the parent has called wait4... but it's child does not end. This is very annoying problem. It seems to depend on the kernel version, how often it happens. With 2.4.18-27 and earlier it happened sometimes, say every 1000th program started on 200 machines (i.e. statistically every 200000th process). With 2.4.20-8 it happened every some 100th process on one machine i.e. every 500th process. With 2.4.20-20 we didn't see it for quite some time. With 2.4.20-28 the problem is back with about the same rate like with 2.4.18-27. The machines are all dual processors. The problem occurs with heavily nonlinear increasing likelyness with increasing processor speed. From 2.8 GHz Xeon or faster it happens MUCH more often than on slower machines. More experiences, whose significance is unclear: It seems only to happen when the processes are started as sub-processes (with some shells inbetween) of rshd. Often the problem occurred when installing RPMs with the rpm Command. I've seen a very interesting behaviour here: Whether the problem showed up depended on the current working directory where the rpm program started. This way the exit hung nearly every time: (pwd is e.g. /) rpm -i <options> /path/to/some/NFS/directory/kernel-some-version.rpm but this way it worked: cd /path/to/some/NFS/directory && rpm -i <options> kernel-some-version.rpm Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): see above How reproducible: spread lots of jobs using rsh to a lot of machines Steps to Reproduce: 1.see above, sorry, that i don't provide rsh using scripts and so on here 2. 3. Actual results: with a certain probability exit does not return Expected results: exit returns, parent gets exit data through some wait Additional info: see above.
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