[lug] Mount process in uninterruptible sleep

[Chris Riddoch]

"Riggs, Rob" <RRiggs at doubleclick.net> writes:

> Your machine needs to be rebooted. Linux has had similar mount problems in
> the kernel all the way back to 1.x (and likely since inception). There are a
> number of things that can cause this. My guess would be that the vfat
> filesystem choked on the data in your disk image. (Are you sure it's vfat
> rather than msdos?)

Hmm. Good point. I'll try that.

> If this hang can be repeated on the most recent kernel in the series you are
> using (2.2 or 2.4), then it would be a good idea to post a message to the
> linux-kernel list describing the problem, how to reproduce it, and offer
> them access to the data file.

Yeah, this is 2.4.2, soon to be 2.4.6.  Mount version mount-2.10f.

> The safest thing to do at this point is to go into single user mode (telinit
> 1), kill any remaining processes (except init, your shell, the errant mount
> command, etc.), then unmount, or remount read-only, all of the filesystems
> that you can. You can then try a clean shutdown or reboot, but my bet is
> that it will hang and you'll need to press the big red button.

That would've been a good idea.  At least running sync, anyway...

> Or you could kill the shell, leave the mount process in its current state
> and continue on as if life were normal.

That's what I was planning on doing... and then I couldn't unmount a CD.
umount froze, same state.  Decided a reboot would be the best thing.

> But by the time you do get around to
> rebooting your machine (months from now, no doubt), you will have forgotten
> about the stray mount process and have to hit the big red button with your
> disks mounted read/write. fsck, fsck, fsck.

Yup. And that's what happened. I made the rather silly assumption that
mount is run differently in the shutdown scripts so it can avoid
freezing.  There was quite a lot of fscking happening on my desktop
this evening.  Grr.

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Chris Riddoch         |  epistemological  | Send spam to: uce at ftc.gov
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