Process stuck in D state while locking in NFS

[Miklos Szeredi]

Hi!

I got an unkillable process:

 FLAGS   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI   SIZE   RSS WCHAN       STA TTY TIME COMMAND
  8000 10348  2486     1   0   0   3808  2244 rpc_execute D   ?   0:00 ./gkeeper 

It was probably stuck while trying to get a read-lock (which was
certainly free) on an NFS volume mounted from a Solaris server.

The load average is now constantly above 1.0 but otherwise the system
is working perfectly. The lock can even be acquired if the program is
started again.

This is not reproducible, but I remember experiencing similar
strangeness, which I didn't investigate at the time.

Is there a rational explanation?

Thanks,
Miklos

Kernel is stock 2.2.14.