RHEL3 hangs during shutdown (apparently unmounting /dev/md0)

Hello,

I hope I'm not the only one on the planet still using RHEL3...

If anybody's listening, I wonder if you might have any clues
about the following:

    Our RHEL3 update9 systems hang during shutdown.  Since very
    few processes are still running at the time time I've
    instrumented the /etc/init.d halt script (to spawn an
    instance of /bin/bash on /dev/tty2) and poked around while
    the shutdown script was hung.  ps shows the umount command
    as basically the only one running and attempts to use strace
    to monitor its activities just hang, so I assume the process
    is in kernel space and getting nowhere.  During this time
    the system goes unresponsive for a minute or more, briefly
    shows signs of life and then going unresponsive again.
    If left alone it seems to always recover.

    Our RAID1 on /dev/md0 contains an ext3 filesystem mounted
    on /mnt/MD0 and the unmount operation itself seems to have
    succeeded at the time we notice the hang.  At least, ls
    shows only the naked mountpoint directory there, not the
    contents of the mounted filesystem.  It's as if after the
    unmount has completed the kernel code gets stuck trying to
    do some sort of cleanup operation.

    using strace to run ps shows that every open of /proc/nnn
    takes approx 1 second.

    Attempts to use mdadm to --examine either of the RAID halves
    or to --query /dev/md0 always hang when they get to the end
    where they'd normally name the /dev/ entries that the RAID
    halves live on.

...so this smells strongly of an MD bug...

-- 

Michael O'Donnell   WSI Corp.   978-983-6613

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