Recently I have seen strange sysvinit behaviour on my system. Sometimes init just locks up, using all CPU available. Thanks to various gentoo-sources realtime kernel enhancements (thanks guys!) it does not lock up the machine completely. This allows me to give you the top line showing init process statistics (it is locked up right now): 1 root 25 0 8244 7328 4 R 69.8 2.9 157:35.31 init I have to mention, that this is a complete lockup; it doesn't respond to telinit U, and examining /proc/1/fd/10 shows that it even doesn't read from fifo at all. It looks like an infinite loop or a deadlock of some kind. I wanted to debug it, but gdb said that it's unable to attach to its process. I also have no idea how to debug it actually. So I would appreciate if someone would try to debug it, but maybe the problem is specific to my system; any hints on how to debug the init process would be helpful, anyway. I haven't been able to find any condition that triggers this behaviour; it seems as if it's completely random. I'm going to reboot now and then look at the sysvinit source code; maybe I can spot where the lockup is possible, or find a way to add some detailed logging code. If anybody wants to help and would like any additional information, I will be happy to extract it at next lockup and provide it here. My baselayout version was 1.8.6.10-r1; right now I have updated to 1.8.6.12 (not rebooted yet), although I don't think it will make any difference, as I don't see any init specific changes in changelog. My machine is an x86 (Coppermine), running Linux 2.4.20-gentoo-r5 kernel.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 34360 ***