I've dug into this a little more. Posting these two patches just as conversation pieces. The spinning NULL task at umount time, it turns out, is the kernel's attempt to send GSS DESTROY_CONTEXT. This NULL is triggered just as the RPC client has killed all tasks. The spinning rpc_task will run until a soft timeout occurs, and then the umount unhangs. Maybe set a shutdown flag in the client, and cause early FSM steps to fail if this flag is set? Or should the client skip context destruction if this flag is set? Any other thoughts? --- Chuck Lever (2): SUNRPC: Set SOFTCONN when destroying GSS contexts sunrpc: Ensure signalled RPC tasks exit -- Chuck Lever