On Thu, Dec 25, 2003 at 06:06:24PM +0200, Eli Billauer wrote: > The issue is that I can't kill the process. The process number is 11005, > I go kill -9 11005 as root, and nothing happens (no, there is no process > number confusion here). This looks like a kernel problem to me (I'm > using 2.4.21). I mean, is there any normal condition, in which a process > should *not* be killed as a result of a "9" signal?
Yes. When the process is sleeping an uninterruptible sleep, it cannot be killed. An uinterruptible sleep happens with the kernel programmer locks a lock saying "I don't want this call to return until I have acquired the lock", as opposed to "I don't want this call to return until I have acquired the lock - unless a signal happens". It is used in two cases: when the programmer was lazy, or when the programmer simply must acquire the lock and cannot abort the operation in the middle. Usually, you'll see a processes in an uninterruptible sleep represented as 'D' in ps. Since you say they are 'R', please do magic-sysrq-t to see where in the kernel they are. Cheers, Muli -- Muli Ben-Yehuda http://www.mulix.org | http://mulix.livejournal.com/ "the nucleus of linux oscillates my world" - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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