[ltp] Immortal process that does not let the computer to sleep.

[Michael Keyl]

Am Sonntag, 25. Dezember 2005 13:38 schrieb Ignacio Fern=E1ndez Galv=E1n:
> Hi,
>
> Some days ago I tried to 'cat' a file in the /proc system, but it didn't
> work, the process hung and would not respond to a "kill -9". I tried
> closing the terminal (it was inside Konsole) and restarting the X server,
> but the process was still there. The real problem is I could not suspend
> the computer, because of this process, it said something like: "Strange,
> bash doesn't want to stop" (of course, the culprit was the 'cat' under
> 'bash'). So, at the end I had to reboot the computer to get rid of this
> process.
>
> Is there any other thing I could try in case this happens again?
>

If a process can not be killed by kill -KILL and not even as root it is=20
usually in the state "uninterruptible sleep" (marked as "D" in a ps). This=
=20
often happens, if an IO operation can not be terminated for some reason (e.=
g.=20
if a file is on an nfs mounted drive and the network is temporarily=20
unavailable). AFAIK there is no general method to get rid of those=20
processes :-( There might be a timeout, but I am not an expert about this. =
A=20
possible solution is to figure out why the corresponding IO is blocked and =
to=20
get rid of _this_  problem first.=20

Michael