[Beowulf] [rpciod] in D state

[Henning Fehrmann]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 04:17:20PM +0200, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Jul 2008, Henning Fehrmann wrote:
> 
> >I assume, the squared brackets mean that these are kernel processes.
> 
> Kernel threads, yes.
> 
> >From time to time one of them changes in to the 'D' (Uninterruptible sleep) mode. Once it happens on a particular node it is also impossible to 
> >mount any nfs exports on this node, which seems logical since the nfs client uses the portmapper.
> 
> Are you able to kill those kernel threads ? Something like:
> 
> killall -9 rpciod
No chance.

> 
> I seem to remember that they are (re)started as needed, but my recollection of the NFS implementation on Linux is somehow hazy. Probably the best 
> place to ask is the Linux NFS mailing list...

We found this:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10837

It might appear only in the 2.6.24 kernel.
I'll try a later version. Unfortunately, this problem appears with a
small probability density. So I have to wait and to observe whether it
appears in a newer kernel.

Cheers
Henning