[mythtv-users] Defunct Mythbackend

[Russ W. Knize]

William Munson wrote:
> Matt Rude wrote:
>> I have be having this problem fro the last few weeks where after a day
>> or so my Mythbackend demon will go defunct and not let me restart the
>> demon
>>
>> /sbin/service mythbackend restart
>> fails every time. the system wont even let me reboot when I try the
>> system will just sit there like as if I didn't tell it to reboot.
>> ps -eaf shows me
>> root      3673     1  5 00:41 ?        00:41:27 [mythbackend] <defunct>
>>
>> anyone have any idea what I can look at.
>>
>>
>> This is a Fedora Core 6 system with an Nvida 7300
>>
>> -Matt
>
> Try enabling verbose logging on the backend and see if the logs show
> anything. Also it would probably help if we knew what version of myth
> you are running.
>
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The backend probably crashed, leaving a child process behind which got
adopted by the "init" process.  The zombie will eventually go away when
init reaps its adopted children.  The log should help determine the cause
of the crash, though this seems to indicate some other problem with some
error handling code somewhere.

Not sure why you can't shutdown, though.  It could be holding some
hardware resource...I've had this happen when a frontend goes bonkers and
somehow hangs on to display driver resources after death.  I've also had
issues when a hard drive was going belly-up, causing the block driver to
hang.  Dump the kernel messages with "dmesg" and look for anything
suspect.

If it's just the "sending all processes KILL" thing, it should timeout
eventually.

Russ