dpkg in uninterruptible sleep

Posted by Khaled on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Khaled
Published on 2012-09-20T09:09:19Z Indexed on 2012/09/20 9:51 UTC
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Filed under:

10.04

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server

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dpkg

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process

I have several Ubuntu servers 10.04. Today, I tried to upgrade some packages on one of these servers and the process got stuck. I logged in using another SSH session and I found that dpkg is in D state (uninterruptible sleep).

According to what I have read, this state results generally from I/O waiting like waiting for NFS share. I can not understand why dpkg will block in this state. I can not see any obvious problems other than this.

Here is the output of ps to show the blocking process:

$ ps axo pid,cmd,s,wchan | grep dpkg
22571 /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 2 D call_rwsem_down_read_failed

This process can not be killed even with kill -9. So, I will not be able to install/upgrade any package unless I reboot the server. What makes it worse is that the remote reboot does not succeed in such a case (having processes in D state).

Can anyone help with this? How can I avoid this in the future.

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