From: MLARKIN@CSUPomona.Edu
   Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 11:47:26 -0800 (PST)

   Thinking I could "ride it out" , I left the process running for a
   few hours, the disk thrashing to all hell. Finally, everything
   stopped. No brain activity.  Clinical system death.

You are witnessing the classic kernel race called 'livelock'.  It
usually happens when the kernel doesn't rid away a process rapidly
eating critical kernel resources at an unstoppable rate.  The end
result is the kernel gets into a situation where it cannot satisfy
anyones requests (even it's own) to do any further processing and just
sits in an endless loop reallocating small amounts of resouces around
which are not enough until it gets to the point where it cannot
'reallocate' any more.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@caip.rutgers.edu