can you kill an lvmerge safely

[Scott_14]

Hello:

Well, for what ever reason, the backup script that runs, splits our vols, and after runs an lvmerge for them, seems to have hung, from what it looks like to me.

In the processing listing there are 3 lvmerge processes, one for each drive. Top shows them sleeping and only actually having 4 seconds of time in the past 4 hours.

Can i kill them, and re-run the lvmerge? the drive is about a 1.2 gig, and doesnt normally take this much time to complete.

thank you

scott

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I would tend to say yes simply for the fact it is mirror disks job to ensure consistancy of the mirror. For example if your system panics or mirror write fails under normal operation you would still like to have the data available even if a sync was occuring or not.

You need to find though the root source of the problem.. have a look at hardware availability with ioscan and syslog for more info. Do you see leds blinking on the disk? Is it actually doing something.
Hopefully you did get the merge syntax correct or you could be in use of your backup!

Later,
Bill

[John Palmer · Accepted solution]

Only one of them will be 'running'. The others should be waiting for the LVM lock and should be killable.

Are your LVM patches up to date? There were problems some time ago on 10.20.

If the process running has 'hung' then I doubt that you will be able to kill it anyway. The only way out may be to reboot.

[Scott_14]

Thank you for the replies, and I beleive the problem goes back a day or so, with this other issue we were having.

I for some reason was not thinking of the "locking" only allowing one merge at a time to happen.

thank you again.

[Starrynight_1]

Hi Scott

It??s been awhile since your problem happened but maybe I can help you with this info.
To see if mirroring is hanged or not in my systems I do:
lvdisplay -v /dev/vg??/lvol? |grep stale|wc -l
then I see how much "stales" there is and issue the command again to see if that number is decreasing. If so, the process is running.
When you reache 0 the LV is completely merged.
Hope this helps.

SN