pat@cs.cornell.edu (Pat Stephenson) (11/20/90)
Every so often, on my 12Meg DEcstation 3100, my epoch process (epoch is a variation of emacs) will hang up for several minutes. It's not swapped out; if I run "pstat -s", the hung process has a non-zero value for the LOCK field. I have never seen a non-zero value for this field under any other circumstances. The man page for pstat doesn't mention the field, however perusal of the source indicates that this is the head of a chain of locks that seem to be associated with symmetric multiprocessing (the p_hlock field defined in <sys/proc.h>). Last I heard, the 3100 is not a multiprocessor (I wish!) Can anybody give me any hints about what is going on? Is this a known bug? Is it fixed in the latest version of ultrix? Possibly relevent information: epoch is invariably the largest process on the system when this happens. I am running: ULTRIX V4.0 (Rev. 174) System #1: Thu Sep 27 17:03:50 EDT 1990 UWS V4.0 (Rev. 164) This afternoon, I seem to be able to replicate this bug at will by starting a compilation subprocess from within epoch. I'm not sure if this is always true. I'd be really grateful for any hints about this; it is quite annoying. Pat Stephenson