When linking large programs on an NFS mounted filesystem, the linker will sometimes hang without any NFS activity (as revealed by nfsstats) taking place. It can be aborted by the interrupt character. The filesystem in question is mounted with read & write sizes=1024, and has been operating well upto the time of the introduction of the merged buffer & VM cache. This problem exhibits itself when the servers are fast or slow, and seems to happen slightly more quickly when the NFS r/w sizes are at their default (8k). Fix: Unknown. How-To-Repeat: Take XFree86 sound and attempt to build it all. Somewhere along the line you'll see it stop. This has also been observed during a make world in /usr/src, where /usr/obj was a NFS mounted FS. Altering the Xfree86 (where both the sources and the objects were on the one NFS mounted filesystem) build to have the Xservers written to /tmp did not appear to alter the problem.
State Changed From-To: open->closed Stephen Hocking, who submitted the PR, claims it's fixed now.