Daemons stuck in 'D' "short-term" wait state

[Dwight Ernest]

In v7n148, Rob McMahon <cudcv%warwick.ac.uk at nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> ... a process which is stuck, reported by ps as in `D' "short
> term" wait, and has been for two days.
>                           ... Last time it happended, earlier
> in the week, all the nfsd's got stuck in this state,
> and the clients froze.

Same thing happened to us once, yesterday, (for the first time) while
running tops2d, the TOPS version 2 Sun daemon. Not killable.  Had to
reboot. Pain in the ***. All of our (Mac) clients froze too.

Do we have a generic problem? Details: SunOS 3.5, 3/60 with 8 MB, and an
excerpt from 'what tops2d' reveals:

	TOPS Version 2.0 11/12/87
	tops.c  1.23    11/12/87
etc...
		--Dwight Ernest
		  Technical Systems Coordinator
		  The Independent (Newspaper Publishing PLC)
		  40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB
			  Phone: +44 1 956 1633
			  ...ukc!independent!dwight