Re: My Linux doesn't honor "kill -9"...Is it a bug or a feature?

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Wed Jan 25 2006 - 01:36:49 EST


On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 11:59 +0530, Arijit Das wrote:
> My GNU/Linux system sometimes doesn't seem to honor the 'KILL' signal
> which is supposed to be a sure-shot killer.


-9 doesn't kill processes in "D" state.
"D" state is a state where they are in the kernel, usually waiting for
IO of some kind of for a semaphore.

The fact that they're stuck is a kernel bug somewhere; to diagnose we
(or probably your OS vendor given you're running a highly antique
kernel) the output of "echo t > /proc/sysrq-trigger", and especially the
part of the dump that shows the process in "D" state.



-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/