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Re: When kill fails...



On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Roland McGrath wrote:

> > Uhmmm....
> > I might have missed something in all UNIX - related manuals I have seen,
> > but...
> > 
> > if
> >  # kill -9 <some pid>
> > fails for a program (that has hung) , what should I do then...

This can happen on Solaris if you have hung NFS processes (and other
network problems).  I have had it happen on Linux when there are SCSI
errors.  Sometimes the only solution is to power-cycle the machine.  

I think the reason is that there are locked kernel processes --- I don't
know whether these cases are "bugs" or "design errors".  Someone on this
list surely knows more about this than I do.

> > 
> > Does there exist any kommand, or call, UNIX specific, HURD specific, or Mach
> > specific - that completely and unfrendly removes a program from the
> > tasklist, and whipes it out of the virtual memory?
> 
> That's what kill -9 should be doing.  Unlike other signals, SIGKILL (9) is
> a special case and in fact does use the low-level Mach task_terminate call
> to nuke the process with extreme prejudice.  Can you give us a specific
> reproducible case of an unkillable process?
> 
> What does "fails" mean?  Please show us the full context and the actual
> output, rather than your interpretation of what happened.
> 
> 
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> 

----
Guy W. Hulbert					At Work:
guy@interlog.com				guy@bioinfo.sickkids.on.ca


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