SV: Lockups with 2.4.14 and 2.4.16

[Johan Ekenberg]

> >  - My not-so-professional guess is that the machine is locked
> > up waiting for some disk i/o that never happens, either to swap
> > or normal filesystem. But, I might be all wrong.
>
> I agree 100% with your diagnostic. Its directly as if your
> /var/spool volume hung and the mylex stopped responding
> on that channel.

/ and /var/spool are on the same channel on the Mylex. If it's a question of
an entire channel hung up, / must be blocked too. Please note, this happened
on several machines so I guess it's not a hardware fault in the Mylex card.

> I take it there is nothing in dmesg ?

I'll check that next time if the command is runnable.

> touch /foo &
> hit return
> (should report it finished)
> touch /var/spool/foo &
> (if this never returns you know you /var/spool choked for some reason)

Thanks, I'll try that also next time.

In the meantime, are there any patches I should apply or other things to
try? I'd rather see there is no "next time"... Since we also upgraded to
ReiserFS 3.6 it seems difficult/impossible to quickly revert to a
2.2-kernel.(?) These are production machines and people are getting upset
about these lockups.

All help appreciated,
regards Johan