Ability to kill (was: Re: so, no way to kill process? have to reboot?)

vda (vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua)
Fri, 12 Oct 2001 12:06:22 +0200


PW> Well, I'd suspect it in "D" state - waiting for some disk I/O to
PW> finish...

If a process is stuck in D state it's a kernel bug - I
don't think it's ever legitimate to wait forever for something
which could never happen. However, some such bugs are rarely
happening (e.g. a swapin failure due to hdd malfunction)
and thus will unlikely be fixed.

PW> But in "R" with your described behavior looks like a bug.
PW> If you care about the CPU time waisted: what about kill -STOP <pid>?

R state unkillable hang is possible too (infinite loop in kernel
preventing return from a syscall).

In short, in my understanding any syscall should return sooner
or later in order to process to be killable. Anything preventing
that is a kernel bug.

However, I'm not a UNIX guru, I may be wrong.
I really like to be enlightened if I'm wrong.

-- 
Best regards, vda
mailto:vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua

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