>>>>> "Frank" == Frank van der Linden <frank@wins.uva.nl> writes:

    Frank> A numeric wchan doesn't provide much information.. is that
    Frank> really what ps says? Or top? If so, is your ps binary up to
    Frank> date? The wchan name is really needed to get any further in
    Frank> analyzing this problem.

The wchan is the kernel virtual address of some data structure related
to the event the process is waiting on. Usually the high-end bits of
this address are stripped off because (a) they're the same for any
kernel VA and (b) there's no space for an 8- or 16-digit hex string in
the output of ps. So, the numeric value printed *is* of use. You can
use your debugger and the kernel's symbol table to work out what that
event is. In fact, that's more or less what ps does when it prints out
the wchan as strings like "nfs_dnlc" or "select" - really helpful,
that last one.