Re: When Kill dosen't work

From: Dances With Crows (danSPANceswitTRAPhcrows_at_gmail.com)
Date: 08/03/05 

Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 20:40:09 -0500

On 2 Aug 2005 18:25:13 -0700, shamer staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
> any advice on what i should do when Kill and Killall PID dosen't
> work? My only resort is to reboot, and i hate that.

You didn't exactly provide a lot of information here. What,
specifically, is unkillable? Are there any common elements to when it
happens and which processes it happens to? Which version of which
distro are you using? Answer those questions, and people may have more
specific suggestions for you.

I think you have a process in state D ("waiting for I/O") and you can't
kill it even with kill -9 . This happens because the process is waiting
for a system call to return, and you can't kill a process that's in the
middle of a system call, no matter what you do. (If you figure out how
to solve this, please tell the kernel hackers; they'd like to know.)

Common causes of processes getting stuck in state D are flaky hardware,
network filesystems where the NFS/SMB server has died, user error, and
bugs in the kernel, from most frequent to least frequent. Answer the
questions in the first paragraph, and maybe someone will be able to
provide some specific advice to you. 

-- 
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /    mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com     /
-----------------------------/        This space sort of for rent.

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