Unable to kill runaway app. -

[Howard Wilkinson]

Bob Goodwin wrote:
> I just had perhaps the third occurrence of this problem.
>
> I tried to shut down gthumb which was displaying a a photo from the 
> nfs server. It would not shut down, at least not in a reasonable 
> amount if time. Gkrellm showed cup1 running at max. and top indicated 
> the cup at 99.5%. Something did eventually time out but that did not 
> calm the cup activity.: .
>
>    3487 bobg      20   0  2928 1068  932 R 99.5  0.0 445:55.55 gam_server
>
> Kill 3487 does not stop it. In fact nothing seems to. I told it to 
> poweroff and it got as far as "halting system" and stayed there until 
> I pressed the power button for five seconds or so.
>
> This happened once last night and it sat there saying it was busy, the 
> power button was required to kill it then too.
>
> I don't expect anyone to troubleshoot the problem but would like to 
> know what other commands I might try to restore things without 
> shutting down and rebooting.
>
> This is an F-10 system pretty much up to date, certainly all security 
> updates and perhaps all the rest, I've lost track at the moment. I 
> suspect the problem is related to some horse photo files from my 
> daughters Mac. But I need a way to stop things when this happens ...
>
> Any help appreciated.
>
> Bob
>
Bob,

what kernel version do you have loaded, is the processor a multicore or 
multiprocessor unit. If the kernel version is a recent FC10 update and 
you are on an SMP motherboard then I have seen the same thing happen 
with other processes. The problem seems to be in the area where it 
interacts with the NFS code, BUT it look like a kernel problem with the 
SMP system. I have not been able to get a dump to prove this but try 
downgrading to an older kernel and see if it goes away - I used the last 
FC9 kernel and it did.

I have since upgraded to FC11 and this also does not exhibit the problem 
so it may just have been with one or two of the latest FC10 builds!

Howard.