freebsd stable - Apr 2010 - X11/rxvt: su fails to login and prints 'load: ...' on return

This morning I pulled up three rxvt terminals and ssh into a remote 
server.  In each of the three ssh sessions I tried to su and failed with 
the following error message:

%su root
Password:load: 0.53  cmd: su 38176 [ttyin] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 1556k
load: 0.53  cmd: su 38176 [ttyin] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 1556k

Client is FreeBSD 8 stable (i386)
Server is FreeBSD 7.2 Release

An identical report was filed against aterm:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=143786

Using a standard xterm, or XFCE Terminal I could su just fine.  Also 
typing stty status '^M' before su, as suggested by Ruslan Ermilov solved
the problem.

-- 
David Samms
New World Data Systems
nw-ds.com

Also, rebooting the client machine made no difference, using rxvt to su 
still fails.  Client software hasn't been modified in a month.

Server had been rebooted last night after 100+ days of uptime as I 
wanted to add the following to /boot/loader.conf

kern.maxusers=512
vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled=1
accf_data_load="YES"
aio_load="YES"

Prior to last nights reboot I have never seen the su problem. 
Immediately after the reboot su worked just fine, 9 hours later su fails.

On 04/30/10 08:39, David Samms wrote:
> This morning I pulled up three rxvt terminals and ssh into a remote
> server.  In each of the three ssh sessions I tried to su and failed with
> the following error message:
>
> %su root
> Password:load: 0.53 cmd: su 38176 [ttyin] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 1556k
> load: 0.53 cmd: su 38176 [ttyin] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 1556k
>
> Client is FreeBSD 8 stable (i386)
> Server is FreeBSD 7.2 Release
>
> An identical report was filed against aterm:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=143786
>
> Using a standard xterm, or XFCE Terminal I could su just fine. Also
> typing stty status '^M' before su, as suggested by Ruslan Ermilov
solved
> the problem.
>

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 08:39:39AM -0400, David Samms
wrote:
> This morning I pulled up three rxvt terminals and ssh into a remote
> server.  In each of the three ssh sessions I tried to su and failed
> with the following error message:
> 
> %su root
> Password:load: 0.53  cmd: su 38176 [ttyin] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 1556k
> load: 0.53  cmd: su 38176 [ttyin] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 1556k
> 
> Client is FreeBSD 8 stable (i386)
> Server is FreeBSD 7.2 Release
> 
> An identical report was filed against aterm:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=143786
> 
> Using a standard xterm, or XFCE Terminal I could su just fine.  Also
> typing stty status '^M' before su, as suggested by Ruslan Ermilov
> solved the problem.
The "load:" part is a FreeBSD nicety, where if you press Control-T in
a
terminal window where there's a running process, you get details of the
system (load avg, etc.) and details of the process (current state, time
used, memory, etc.).  In the pty/tty driver, this correlates to VSTATUS,
which sends SIGINFO to the process.  See stty(1) man page, search for
"kerninfo".

I realise this doesn't help solve your dilemma, but I wanted to let you
know where the load line comes from and how you might be able to trace
it back.

I'm also adding Ed Schouten, who's responsible for the pty/tty driver;
he might have some ideas how/why this is happening.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc@parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |