lvmkd

[Mark Greene_1]

ps -ef shows 6 instances of this, both on my 10.20 D box and my 11.0 L2000. There is no man page for it, nor is there mention of it in any man page. From the name it is obviously an lvm deamon of some sort, but what is "k", and why 6? My D server is only a 2 disk system; my L server is a 2 disk system with an SC10 array of 5 mirror pairs, but they are setup as raw devices for the database.

TIA,
mark

[Helen French]

Hi,

Check this out:

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=aae8b301044fea0599/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000024614112

HTH,
Shiju

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Mark,

Try this link,

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=6f9c09f40c39df7072/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000024614112

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Roger Baptiste]

hi,

lvmkd is LVM related daemon which runs at Kernel mode and will fire up whenenver a LV related command is issued.

I am not sure about why there are six daemons.
Probably it is to spread the load for a busy system. Even though you are using "raw devices", it is still a Raw "volume", so these daemons are necessary.

HTH
raj

[Helen French · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

I have checked 3 of my servers and found all are running 6 lvmkd processes. However, if you check this with a 'ps -el' command, if in the first rift is a '0' then this process is deactivated.

# ps -el | grep "^ 0"

This will list you the lvmkd processes as deactivated. The reason why the system deactivate processes is, that there is (temporary) not enough free physical memory available. As lvmkd is controlled by Kernel, i don't think you can do something on this.

HTH,
Shiju

[Mark Greene_1]

Shiju,

Evidentally 6 is what hp has run. I see one or two go active on my production system (the L2000 running 11.0), so I'm not too worried about them being out there. I just wasn't sure what they were, and not having a man page struck me as odd. But then I did a ps -ef |grep "d$" and many of the daemon processes do not have man pages (vhand, supsched, strweld, strfreebd, smpsched, vxfsd, basicdsd, lvmschedd, nfskd, etc.) and I find that somewhat frustrating.

I was trying to get a list of critical processes that need to run all of the time. With no documentation, this is a tedious task. For example, psmond is running, but we do not have predictive support setup. I suppose I could get away with killing it, but then predictive support sounds like it would be useful, and if I am already paying for the service in my hardware support, I'll probably activate it. But for the other daemon processes that have no man pages, I cannot make similar type of evaluations.

Granted, many of them are easy to figure out by thier names and are obviously needed, but I doubt that that is 100% the case.

My thanks to you an all who replied.

mark

[Helen French]

Hi Mark,

Again:

"k" in lvmkd stands for Kernel. lvmkd - is an LVM Kernel Daemon.

The support plus March 2002 will have a fix for the problem of lvmkd hanging - PHKL_23127 (LVM cumulative patch). Read this document:

http://www.software.hp.com/SUPPORT_PLUS/docs/HWE1100.html

HTH,
Shiju

[Mark C. LaFevre]

The link to the document ID 200000024614112 is no longer valid and I can't find this document when searching... any ideas where it can be found?