How to bring Fedora Core 3 to its knees!

[Peter]

On Wed, 3 May 2006, James Knott wrote:

> Paul King wrote:
>> Okay, kiddies! Here's what you do ...
>> Stick a defective CD in your CD-ROM bay and run the "find" command.
>> It works until it comes to something wrong in one of the directories,
>> then the kernel starts ripping through so many I/O errors (seemingly
>> dozens per second), that your only choice is to reboot, even if you have
>> files open. You can't bring down X (ctrl+alt+backsapce); you can't ctrl
>> +alt+delete; you can't do SFA!
>>
>> Works like a charm :-)
>
> What happens if you press ctl-alt-esc and then click on the offending
> window?  Can you ssh in from another system to kill the process?

I think not. I have seen this problem with dead or dying hard disks. The 
kernel drivers have timeouts but it is possible to run into a drive that 
times out with error, just before the kernel does. So you have a system 
that tries to read say 10,000 sectors with a drive-imposed timeout of 2 
seconds. That will take a while, and the kernel process is 
uninterruptible at that point. In theory, if you wait it out, it will 
eventually come back to a prompt, but sometimes you cannot wait that 
long.

Peter
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