Unkillable processes?

[Ben Scott]

On 2/17/06, Dan Coutu <coutu at snowy-owl.com> wrote:
> On a Red Hat 9 system I've encountered a situation where there are two
> processes that I cannot kill when using kill -9 (or any other value, for
> that matter.)

  Do a "ps aux" and note their status.  It's "D", right?  That means
they're in "uninterruptable sleep" -- waiting for system call to
finish something that cannot be interrupted.  The "D" stood for
"driver" or "disk" originally.  Bad hardware or buggy device drivers
are the most common cause of a process stuck in this state.  The only
thing you can do is wait or reboot the system.

  If the syscalls ever complete, the kernel will immediately process
the kill signals you sent, so those processes are dead, they just
don't know it yet.  :)

-- Ben