This sounds like my problem! I don't think it has anything to do with reiserfs (as some people suggested earlier), because I am not using reiserfs. I am however running httpd as well. My Kernel Version is 2.4 Markus Roth wrote:

hello, don't flame me if i'm wrong, but probably you got the same problem as i do. i have the same kernel as you (David). my mail from yesterday and the response from Markus Gaugusch:

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hello, does somebody knows what's going on? my problem: on the average twice per week a process remains suddenly hang on my laptop (SuSE 7.1 / 2.4.0). As soon as I do a ps or something similar this process hangs too. I straced the ps command and got following output:

[snip] ipc_subcall(0x6, 0x816a308, 0x400, 0xd) = 480 stat64("/proc/1234", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 open("/proc/1234/stat", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, <unfinished ...>

It seems that every command hangs (ps, fuser, killall, netstat -ap) that reads thru the proc file system and tries to open some files of the process 1234.

If I try to 'cat' the file /proc/1234/stat the same thing happens.

I'm am absolutely not sure, but I guess the process 1234 is httpd (apache 1.3.17 installed). Only if apache is running this seams to happen. Unfortunately I can't identify the process because every command I know reads from the proc file system.

the bad thing is, I can't even reboot my machine because this tries to terminate the processes and hangs too nor can I unmount my partitions because they are busy.

any ideas what this could be or what i should do? greetings & thanks markus

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then Markus Gaugusch wrote: if you enable "Magic SysRq Key" in kernel and rc.config, you can press alt+prtscr+s to sync your disks, alt+prtscr+u to remount them readonly and alt+prtscr+b to reboot the machine.

next time this happens to me i will try the hint from Markus Gaugusch bye markus

David Henderson wrote:

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Roman Drahtmueller wrote:

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Guys, your problem descriptions lack a simple detail: The kernel version.

2.4.0-64GB-SMP

I cannot use the 2.2.18 kernel since I have multiple PCI buses. I have tried using the 2.4.3 kernel from the SuSE source, but I have not had the time to fix the other issues (usbmgr, audio, etc...). Thanks and sorry!!

Dave H

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