Hello
The filesystem in question is on a 36GB SCSI drive, the only
partition on this drive. The fs contains 22 GB of data, quota is
used with few exception. The filesystem is exported to about 15
Linux clients, 1 Debian, the others SuSE8.2 and 8.1 , and 1
OpenBSD client. The server is P3 2-way SMP with 4GB of RAM.
Occasionally xfsdump is hanging in uninterruptible sleep.
Occasionally means, that it happens sometimes, but I have not
been able to trigger the problem.
Usually xfsdump is run at night writing about 20 GB via rmt to a
Sun box with a DLT streamer attached to it. If the problem
happens, it must be at the beginning of the dump, from the
backup logs I have.
I have not found a way to kill xfsdump in this state, the machine
has to be booted, or the other night the next xfsdump started
will get into the same state. There are no diagnostics somewhere
in the system, syslog, console, dmesg. ps says xfsdump is in
lock_p.
The problem happens with the SuSE-kernels delivered with SuSE-8.1
and 8.2, and with all patched Linus with XFS patched, and with
-ac kernels. All kernels I have tried show the problem. Before
the update to SuSE 8.2 it took once 3 months between two cases
of hanging xfsdump using a vanilla 2.4.21 kernel with xfs 1.2
patched.
I have tried xfsdump to /dev/null and putting the system under
load (more disk load, more network load), but I could not
trigger the problem. The tape drive swallows about 5MB/sec, by
dumping to /dev/zero the rate is about 15MB/sec, which should be
more stress to the system.
Twice, the hanging xfsdump was not noticed for some days and the
system got instable, kernel NFSd hanging, which made a reboot
mandatory.
Any ideas?
Bernd Strieder
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