When Kill dosen't work 4339

On 2 Aug 2005 18:25:13 -0700, shamer staggered into the Black Sun and said:

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 GThere 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 ----------------------------- This space sort of for rent.