Re: Kill does not stop process

[briand@aracnet.com]

>>>>> "Justin" == Justin Guerin <jguerin@cso.atmel.com> writes:

  Justin> uninterruptable sleep.  If it is, there's nothing you can do
  Justin> about it, except reboot.  Also note, that each process in
  Justin> uninterruptable sleep will count as 1 in your load average,
  Justin> even if it's not taking any cpu / network / disk resources.

  Justin> I haven't done this myself, but you might check out the
  Justin> other threads about CD writing in 2.6.8 to get some pointers
  Justin> about how to get cdrecord to complete successfully.  I
  Justin> believe you may need to specify the device.  Of course, this
  Justin> assumes you're using a 2.6.x kernel.  If you're not, I'm not
  Justin> really sure why cdrecord would hang.

Which brings up a more interesting question : why isn't just aout
every process killable ?

After all if I tell the kernel to kill process x, why can't the
scheduler at the next opportunity just clobber the process, take away
it's interrupts (by masking or overwriting the interrupt vector or
whatever) , etc...

Is it because hardware oriented tasks run at the same level as the
scheduler, and so it is unable to ?

It seems very odd that a process should ever become "unkillable".
There must be a very fundamental limitation in the way the kernel
works to cause such a problem.

Brian