Infrastructure Software

The 'ps' command is hanging on our Solaris 11 test environment. It does not respond to kill or even kill -9. This happens even when ps is called in its plain form with no arguments, and I tried it as two different users and as root, and it hung in all cases. At least, 'ptree' is still functioning. This happens only in the global zone.

I can think of two possible culprits. The first is that we blindly removed a zfs filesystem that had been delegated to a non-global zone. I shut that zone down and is now only in the 'installed' state, but it didn't make a difference. Truss actually shows 'ps' hanging shortly after this stat call to a different zone:

769: stat("/dev/zcons/aodtest4/masterconsole", 0xFFFFFFFF7FFFE9B0) = 0
769: stat("/dev/zcons/aodtest4/zoneconsole", 0xFFFFFFFF7FFFE9B0) = 0
769: getdents(5, 0xFFFFFFFF7EB02000, 8192) = 0
769: close(5) = 0
769: stat("/dev/zcons/builder", 0xFFFFFFFF7FFFEBB0) = 0
<hangs here>

I shut down this second zone ('builder') to no effect.

I had also accessed a NFS automount in the days before noticing this problem, although 'mount | grep ^/net' is currently showing now output.

Any suggestions? I could reboot but I'd hate to encounter this problem in production with several zones running.

Thanks,
Tony