On Sun, 03 Dec 2006 13:30:11 +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote: > occasions), I can't even kill the GNOME process (kill -9 failed on > several processes running under GNOME). That's really weird, and I've > never seen this sort of behaviour before.
That can happen if the process is in uninterruptible sleep (i.e. waiting for IO to complete). If this is the case, ps and top should reveal the process' status as 'D'. The only time I've observed a process in this state is when experiencing hardware problems, e.g., a process blocks in state D while tyring to read from under /proc/bus/usb after the kernel's USB subsystem is hosed by my evil MP3 player. So if your processes are in this state, try finding out what file descriptor they are trying to read from (with strace -p $pid) and then looking up the fd in the list of open files (lsof -p $pid). Of course, it might be something totally different. ;) -- Sam Morris http://robots.org.uk/ PGP key id 1024D/5EA01078 3412 EA18 1277 354B 991B C869 B219 7FDB 5EA0 1078 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]