Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 57940
'top' and 'ps' hang, possibly while accessing /proc
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:38:51 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 Description of problem: For reasons as yet undetermined, 'top' and 'ps' hang in a system that seems otherwise stable. Coincident with 'top' and 'ps' starting to hang, a wine session running lotus notes locks up. Doing an 'ls -lR' of the /proc file system causes a lockup, as well. More specifically, it seems to hang while listing out the directory of a particular process ID. I'd wager that that directory belongs to the wine process that locks up. All these lockups are unkillable (even using -9). The machine must be rebooted (a tricky problem, considering /proc is corrupt). So, what's the next step in trying to fix this? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1.Run Lotus Notes under WINE 2.Wait for it to hang. 3.Wail and gnash teeth. Actual Results: /proc gets corrupted, and things that depend on it start hanging. Expected Results: Well, Ideally, nothing. Notes under WINE shouldn't hang, either, but I'll tackle that locally (since it's a local version of WINE and notes). Additional info: I'm filing this as a kernel bug, because the /proc filesystem is the responsibility of the kernel, and userspace programs shouldn't be able to corrupt it like this.
A deadlock in this area has been fixed in the 2.4.9-21 kernel, released as erratum.
Using this has fixd it for some machines, but not for others (some of them lock up more now). Where can I find documentation on the errata, and how can this be debugged?