[OT] RAM disk (tmpfs) locking up

When running the tests on a RAM disk (tmpfs) the process accessing the RAM disk sometimes locks up and no "kill" signal can kill it. This is not specific to Subversion; I assume it is a bug in the shmfs driver. I particularly noticed that deltes like "rm -rf /tmp/ramdisk/svn-check/" often trigger a seg fault and/or lock-up. I tried sending it, as root, all the signals numbered from 1 to 31, and still the "rm" process remains in the process list, in the state "D" or "Z". The same for a "lt-svn" process which hung.

A while back I searched on Google and found one or two reports of this sort of problem but no useful answer.

Any ideas?

As a work-around, is there any more forceful way to kill a process than "for i in `seq 1 31`; do kill -n $i PID; done" ? When that doesn't work I resort to re-booting.

> uname -a
Linux linux 2.4.21-99-default #1 Wed Sep 24 13:30:51 UTC 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
> mount
[...]
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

This mount was provided by default in my SuSE Linux 9.0.

I was running the tests in "/tmp/ramdisk" which was a symlink to "/dev/shm" (or to "/dev/shm/ramdisk" after "mkdir /dev/shm/ramdisk"). If I instead "mkdir /tmp/ramdisk", everything works fine but of course slowly because it is on disk.

- Julian

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Received on Wed Mar 17 18:11:59 2004