> A process can get swapped out anytime. It could be the case, that it was
> swapped out before you kill -9'ed it. Do you know why it is hanging in
> 'D' (short term uninterruptible sleep)? What wait channel is it stuck on?

Could the wait channel be a serial port descriptor that the process is 
trying to close?

> ps -axl should be able to tell you.
Unfortunately its really hard to reproduce the problem but I'll do this the 
next time it happens.

Thanks,
 Brad

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christos Zoulas" <christos@tac.gw.com>
To: <netbsd-help@netbsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: SIGKILLed process swapping out


> In article <009801c52fbf$4dfad3b0$6ea8a8c0@acervfr9okf50t>,
> Brad du Plessis <bduplessis@commissionaires.ab.ca> wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'm running NetBSD-2.0_STABLE and would like to know what the "swapped 
>>out"
>>flag means as seen in a process listing. I was running a process that I
>>tried to kill (SIGTERM) and it didn't respond. I then tried a SIGKILL
>>(kill -9) and after a couple seconds I did a process listing and found the
>>ps flags were 'DW'. From the ps manpage the W means the process is swapped
>>out, does it make sense that a process having just received a SIGKILL 
>>would
>>be in this state?
>
> A process can get swapped out anytime. It could be the case, that it was
> swapped out before you kill -9'ed it. Do you know why it is hanging in
> 'D' (short term uninterruptible sleep)? What wait channel is it stuck on?
> ps -axl should be able to tell you.
>
> christos
>