killing server crashes 4.2 on vax 780

[romig at osu-eddie.UUCP]

From: romig (Steve Romig)


We have a Vax 780 running 4.2Bsd, and we are having a problem wherein
if you have a server which has been doing all sorts of IPC business, and 
you try to kill it (like with ^C) then unix grinds to a halt (or 
something like that - it's hard to tell.  It doesn't panic or anything
useful like that.)

I'm staring at the bug reports (without the FIXes) from Mt Xinu that I
picked up at the Usenix conference.  There's a bug report from Michael
Killian (killianm at rpi.csnet) from June 19, 1984, that describes a similar
problem (where he says that if you kill the process from the terminal
you started it on, it hangs the world, but killing it from another 
terminal kill sthe process without hanging everything.)  However, he
doesn't report a fix for it.

Can someone out there give me a good idea of what it going wrong and what
I can do about it?  We'd appreciate it...

--- Steve