This bug has been copied from bug #459629 and has been proposed to be backported to 5.3 z-stream (EUS).
Shutting down multipathd hangs the machine fairly regularly on s390x under RHEL5.2 and RHEL5.3. Other architectures could theoretically experience the hang too (in practice this has not been common). When multipathd is shutting down the main process signals all the waiter threads to stop. However, they can't stop until the main process unlocks it's mutex. However, immediately after the main process does this it destroys the mutex. This is a problem because unless all the waiter threads can get their work done before the mutex is destroyed they will be attempting to lock and unlock a destroyed mutex. A known workaround is to send SIGKILL to multipathd so that it doesn't attempt the graceful thread shutdown which could potentially hang. The following demonstrates the workaround: # service multipathd status multipathd (pid 2031) is running... # killall -KILL multipathd # service multipathd restart Stopping multipathd daemon: [FAILED] Starting multipathd daemon: [ OK ] # service multipathd status multipathd (pid 2450) is running...
The fix has been backported.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2009-0432.html