greg (09/10/82)
We are running UNIX V7, with the enhancements made by DEC (they call it UNIX V7/m 2.1). For about the past 3 months now, we have had intermmitent failures - the kernel just goes into a loop. I have racked my brains over this, but have not been able to find the probem. Post-mortem 'ps's show several processes in the run-queue, nothing really fishy - although on several occasions the system has crashed while people we running 'learn' (lnrtee shows up on the 'ps'). The CPU always loops in different locations. Another thing that causes the bug is if the super-user has a process the creates too many children (30-40) - BAM, the system goes belly-up (you can crash the system by becoming super-user and typing "sh<cr>" over and over (the system crashes BEFORE the process limit (NPROC) is ever reached)....I've looked at user structures, process tables, inode tables (sometimes inodes seem to get zero'ed out in the process, or simply 'dissappear' (like inodes defining tty's), open-file tables and I cannot for the life of me find what it causing this. If ANYONE has had ANY similar experience, I would appreciate it to NO end if you could drop me a line......thanks Greg Travis decvax!pur-ee!iuvax!isrnix!greg