I am running 2.6.32 and am faced by exactly this problem on
a machine I cannot just reboot:

% ps aux | egrep -c '<D>.+vgdisplay'
37821

lsof or strace on existing processes don't show anything, but strace
on a new vgdisplay process shows that it blocks on opening
/dev/cdrom, which seems to be defective.

--
.'`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> Related projects:
: :' : proud Debian developer http://debiansystem.info
`. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck http://vcs-pkg.org
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems

On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 13:27 +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> I am running 2.6.32 and am faced by exactly this problem on
> a machine I cannot just reboot:
>
> % ps aux | egrep -c '<D>.+vgdisplay'
> 37821
>
> lsof or strace on existing processes don't show anything, but strace
> on a new vgdisplay process shows that it blocks on opening
> /dev/cdrom, which seems to be defective.

Was this a version before or after the libata transition?

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.

also sprach Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> [2010.06.21.0120 +0200]:
> > I am running 2.6.32 and am faced by exactly this problem on
> > a machine I cannot just reboot:
> >
> > % ps aux | egrep -c '<D>.+vgdisplay'
> > 37821
> >
> > lsof or strace on existing processes don't show anything, but strace
> > on a new vgdisplay process shows that it blocks on opening
> > /dev/cdrom, which seems to be defective.
>
> Was this a version before or after the libata transition?

I have not really followed the transition, but this is on a lenny
system with a 2.6.32 backports.org kernel. How can I check?

--
.'`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> Related projects:
: :' : proud Debian developer http://debiansystem.info
`. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck http://vcs-pkg.org
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems

On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 11:33 +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> [2010.06.21.0120 +0200]:
> > > I am running 2.6.32 and am faced by exactly this problem on
> > > a machine I cannot just reboot:
> > >
> > > % ps aux | egrep -c '<D>.+vgdisplay'
> > > 37821
> > >
> > > lsof or strace on existing processes don't show anything, but strace
> > > on a new vgdisplay process shows that it blocks on opening
> > > /dev/cdrom, which seems to be defective.
> >
> > Was this a version before or after the libata transition?
>
> I have not really followed the transition, but this is on a lenny
> system with a 2.6.32 backports.org kernel. How can I check?

We switched from IDE drivers to libata-based drivers in 2.6.32-10. My
suspicion is that this is a bug in ide-cd which will no longer apply.

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.

also sprach Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> [2010.06.21.1211 +0200]:
> We switched from IDE drivers to libata-based drivers in 2.6.32-10. My
> suspicion is that this is a bug in ide-cd which will no longer apply.

This could very well be. I was running
linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.2-amd64 2.6.32-8~bpo50+1 at the time. With
linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-amd64 2.6.32-15~bpo50+1, the problem seems
to have disappeared.

Thanks,

--
.'`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> Related projects:
: :' : proud Debian developer http://debiansystem.info
`. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck http://vcs-pkg.org
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems