From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17-21mdk i686; Nav) Description of problem: After upgrading a RedHat 6.2 installation to kernel 2.2.19-6.2.1 compiled for the 686, I get processes stuck in the D state. This happens occasionally, and doesn't seem to be following a pattern: once it was an "rpm -Uvh" that got stuck, another time it was a postfix process, and another time 70 httpd processes and a qmail got stuck. In every case, if I the box doesn't get too overloaded, the hung processes stay around for a few hours, then eventually disappeared. I've had this happen on two UP boxes, and on one SMP server, all Pentium 3's running the . None of these machines were doing anything NFS related, nor accessing any slow devices. How reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce Additional info: It never happened to me with the previous kernel (the 2.2.14-based kernels that came with the original rh 6.2), but it started happening as soon as I upgraded to 2.2.19 to fix the setuid bug.
Created attachment 20292 [details] "ps" and "cat /proc/meminfo" output from SMP server with 60+ stuck processes
it just happened again, with Apache processes getting stuck in "D" state on an SMP box, running kernel-smp-2.2.19-6.2.1.i686.rpm. this time I had time to run a "ps alnx", and found that the WCHAN field was pointing to __wait_on_page, IP=122ad1. running a "gdb /boot/vmlinux-2.2.19-6.2.1smp" and then "disass __wait_on_page", and then looking at mm/filemap.c in the kernel source, shows that the lockups happen on the call to schedule() within __wait_on_page. i don't know much about kernel hacking, but this should at least point out to where to start looking...
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/