Processes stuck in D state

[Nick Burrett <nick dsvr net>]

Hi,

I have several servers configured as follows:
   an unpatched 2.4.19-pre7 kernel, IDE discs, 1Gb RAM (not all used),
load avg around 1-4.
   a large partition, formatted reiserfs
   within large partition are 80 300Mb loopback file systems, formatted
ext3, quotas enabled

From time to time, the processes on the server get stuck in D state.
The processes can be attributed to one loopback filesystem i.e. 
processes using other loopback filesystems remain unaffected.

Since there's no kernel oops, I've provided the (gzipped) SysRQ-T output 
that was dumped by the kernel.  You'll notice several sendmail processes 
stuck like this:

sendmail      D F0E31F9C     0 32680    436           328 32617 (NOTLB)
Call Trace: [page_getlink+34/176] [__down+104/208] [__down_failed+8/12]
[.text.lock.namei+53/1221] [link_path_walk+1822/2496]
Call Trace: [<c0147402>] [<c01076f8>] [<c01078a4>] [<c0147730>]
[<c014453e>]
    [path_release+16/48] [getname+94/160] [__user_walk+51/80]
[sys_lstat64+20/112] [system_call+51/56]
    [<c0143b90>] [<c014390e>] [<c0144c73>] [<c0141474>] [<c0108b0b>]


Any thoughts ?

Regards,

Nick.

Attachment: msgs.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data