Subject: Re: kern/8679: kill -9 fail to kill some processes
To: None <netbsd-bugs@netbsd.org, gnats-bugs@netbsd.org>
From: Christoph Badura <bad@oreilly.de>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 10/25/1999 18:34:57
p99dreyf@criens.u-psud.fr writes:
>>Description:
>Some processes (mountd, httpsd, login...) crash and are not killable by
>a kill -9.
When a process is sleeping at an uninterruptable priority no signals will
be delivered to it until it wakes up. After it wakes up, the SIGKILL will
terminate the process.
>Here is ps -axl output for thoses processes
> 0 25546 1 0 -18 0 136 0 uvn_ge DWs ?? 0:00.12 mountd
That's only one process. Are the others also waiting on "uvn_ge"?
And this process is sleeping at an uninterruptible priority.
Did you get disk errors before this? Are you using NFS?
>>How-To-Repeat:
>No idea about how thoses processes appear. As the system is running, new
>unkillable zombies processes appear.
These aren't zombie processes. A zombie process is a process which has
exited and released all its resources. It is now just occupying a process
table slot so that the parent process can collect the exit status.
Zombies are marked with a Z in state column of ps output.
--
Christoph Badura www.netbsd.org
Anything that can be done in O(N) can be done in O(N^2).
-- Ralf Schuettau (after looking at a particular piece of code)