The original question:
=====================
Problem: a Sun 3/60 running 4.0.3 occasionally gets into a weird
state. I can telnet to the machine, but it takes several minutes
before I get logged in. Once I get in, ps -axe returns only the
header line-- no info on the current status of the system. pstat -T
or pstat -i reports kernel: read error.
Looking back through /var/adm/messages, I notice the following errors
occurred last night (while a program was backing up a local SCSI disk)
Nov 6 00:00:10 ra vmunix: proc: table is full
Nov 6 00:00:10 ra vmunix: proc: table is full
Nov 6 00:00:09 ra named[56]: panic xfer [v]fork: No more processes
Is there a bug that causes the 4.0.3 kernel to get hosed when it
temporarily runs out of proc entries?
The responses:
=============
All but one of the responses replied with something like:
>From: stern@sunne.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - NE Area Tactical Engineering)
>
>it's not a bug, it's sort of a mis-feature. when
>the proc table fills up, weird things happen, and
>sometimes you can't fork() enough new procs to
>clean up the mess.
>
>increase MAXUSERS in the kernel config file and
>the problem goes away.
>
>--hal
The other suggestion came from:
>From: geertj@ica.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)
>
>No such problem I know of. You can, however, find out what's going on:
>L1-A
>g 0
>(machine will panic)
>L1-A during reboot, but AFTER coredump
>b -s
>mount a filesystem with, say, 15 byte free on it
>savecore /filesystem_you_just_mounted
>Bring up the machine multi-user
>
>cd /filesystem_you_just_mounted
>ps, using -c vmcore.1 (generated by savecore above).
>
>See procedures in chap 22 of sysadmin manual of 4.1.1, 4.0.3 method is
>similar but we don't have the man pages anymore.
Thanks to:
==========
stern@sunne.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - NE Area Tactical Engineering)
geertj@ica.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)
mcostel@kaman.com (Mark Costello)
mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)
sq!sqwest!sqwest.wimsey.bc.ca!mch (Mark C. Henderson)
Charles <mcgrew@porthos.rutgers.edu>
Arie Bikker <aribi@geo.vu.nl>
Brian
field@cs.pitt.edu
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