Unkillable processes?

[Dan Coutu]

Ben Scott wrote:
> 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
>   
Hmm, the I/O wait seems likely. We've been having trouble with an IOMega 
REV 10 disk autoloader ever since we bought the thing. Even swapped it 
out for  a new one but still get flaky behavior. Maybe it's time to send 
the thing back...

Dan