Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot?

[Bill Davidsen]

DervishD wrote:
>     Hi Gene :)
>
>  * Gene Heskett <gheskett@xxxxxxxx> dixit:
>
> > > Traditionally, a common cause for such wedging was a lost/misplaced
> > > interrupt from an I/O operation, so a read()/write()/ioctl() call
> > > wouldn't return because the device hadn't reported it completed.
> > > (tape drives were notorious for this). Often, power-cycling the I/O
> > > device would cause an unsolicited interrupt to be generated, which
> > > would clear the "waiting for interrupt" issue and allow the process
> > > to return....
> >
> > Well, since the "device", a bt878 based Haupagge tv card is sitting in 
> > a pci socket, thats even more drastic than a reboot.
>
>
>     Do you mean your Hauppage got stuck in disk-sleep state? Wow,
> that's sound *weird*...
>
>     I think that the parent (which is whatever process did the fork
> when you clicked your mouse) is still alive and forgetting to do the
> 'wait()' for its children.

It would be good to know what the PPID is, from ps or similar. Things 
from X are a pain, the parent is often something you don't want to kill. 
Sometimes you can reparent from command line, "bash -c foo&" or similar, 
so the parent can be killed without logging out.

I would swear that the parent *is* init in some cases, which is puzzling 
since they should be reaped.

--
   -bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
 last possible moment - but no longer"  -me
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