Re: killed process still on-screen

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 08:15:49AM +0800, csj wrote:
| On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 19:42:40 -0600
| Nori Heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
| 
| > on Thu, 17 Jan 2002 11:33:25PM +0200, Ian Balchin insinuated:
| > > I locked up mutt & jove while editing a message.  I killed them from
| > > top but cannot get use of tty1 back which still shows the process.
| > > 
| > > I do not want to reboot. Any magical suggestions which rtfm to
| > > examine?
| > 
| > ps aux | grep tty1
| > kill -9 [pid of tty1]
| 
| Is there anything more drastic than -9 (short of rebooting)?

nope.  processes aren't allowed to handle signal 9 so they can't block
it like they can with 15 or 11.

| How do I terminate the living dead?
| 
| alpha:~# ps -A | grep defunct
| 31080 ?        00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
| 31081 ?        00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
| alpha:~# kill -9 31080
| alpha:~# ps -A | grep defunct
| 31080 ?        00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
| 31081 ?        00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
| 
| And here's top's top:
| 
|  08:11:45 up 5 days, 17:10,  6 users,  load average: 0.07, 0.03, 0.00
| 94 processes: 91 sleeping, 1 running, 2 zombie, 0 stopped
 
Those processes are blocked on IO or something.  Thus it is the
_kernel_ itself that is stuck, which is why SIGKILL has no effect.
When a process is executing in its own space, the kernel can kill it
and clean up the pieces.  When the process is executing inside the
kernel (in a system call) then the kernel can't blow it away because
it would then need to somehow put itself back together.

-D

-- 

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