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

[Richard Neill]

Andreas Paul wrote:
> Please check the Sound Deamon of the KDE, he hungs often on a Thinkpad
> when you will Suspend.
> I think this is the Process do you seach for.

No, that's not it. This problem most frequently occurs with mount, when
the underlying IO device isn't there any more!

[And yes, Arts is horrid: fortunately, with dmix, you don't need it any
more! ]

> 
> 2005/12/28, Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk>:
> 
>>
>>Mike Kershaw wrote:
>>
>>>>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.
>>>
>>>
>>>If the process is listed in 'ps' as state 'D' (and it sounds like it is,
>>>since kill -9 didn't make it die), then you can't do anything.  It's in
>>>uninterruptable IO sleep, forever.  You'll have to take an unclean
>>>shutdown to get rid of it, there is no way to kill it.
>>>
>>
>>I've seen this occur quite frequently. (eg mplayer with win32 codecs on
>>dodgy hardware), or if you inadvertently unplug a usb memory key without
>>unmounting it properly.  Furthermore, if one process is in this state,
>>running ps,top,or kill will put the ps/top/kill process into the same state!
>>
>>However, the existence of such a state is surely a kernel bug?  Is there
>>anything that can be done to fix it?
>>
>>Richard
>>
>>
>>--
>>The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
>>http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>>

-- 
rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk  **  http://www.richardneill.org
Richard Neill, Trinity College, Cambridge, CB21TQ, U.K.