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Date:      Sun, 25 Jul 1999 17:31:32 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Kevin Day <toasty@dragondata.com>
Cc:        kkenn@rebel.net.au, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Unkillable processes
Message-ID:  <19990725173132.E51019@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <199907250621.BAA55777@celery.dragondata.com>; from Kevin Day on Sun, Jul 25, 1999 at 01:21:03AM -0500
References:  <19990725154108.A51019@freebie.lemis.com> <199907250621.BAA55777@celery.dragondata.com>

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On Sunday, 25 July 1999 at  1:21:03 -0500, Kevin Day wrote:
>> On Saturday, 24 July 1999 at 20:51:37 -0500, Kevin Day wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Kevin Day wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> For one, do another 'ps' with the 'l' option, so you can see what it's stuck
>>>>> on.
>>>>
>>>>   UID   PID  PPID CPU PRI NI   VSZ  RSS WCHAN  STAT  TT       TIME COMMAND
>>>>  1000  1103  1086  29  75 20  5740  384 -      TWN   ??    0:00.00 (kvt)
>>>>  1000  1109  1103   0   4  0  1504    0 ttywri IWs+  p1    0:00.00 (tcsh)
>>>>
>>>>  1000 92724  1086 279 105 20  5736  356 -      RN    ??  139:40.13 kvt -T Termi
>>>>  1000 92743 92724   2  18  0  1576    0 pause  IWs   p8    0:00.00 (tcsh)
>>>>
>>> Well, since the CPU time in the active process (92724) went up since your
>>> last e-mail, and it's in the RUN state (a - in the WCHAN and a R in the
>>> STAT), it looks like the process is just spinning, eating CPU.
>>
>> Right.
>>
>>> The tcsh listed below that is a zombie of the running kvt.
>>
>> There aren't any zombies here.
>>
>> It's a child of the kvt.  It's not a zombie.  Take a look at the STAT
>> field (and ps(1)): process
>
> Good point, i didn't notice that, i saw the ()'s from his first message,

They mean that ps can't access the command line information, for
example because the process has been swapped.

>> Process 92724 is runnable, nice and running (no WCHAN).  I really
>> don't understand why you can't stop this one.
>
> The only time I've seen this is when my console is getting flooded with
> 'vm_fault: pager error' messages for that process. Otherwise, there's no
> reason why a running process can't be killed, correct?

No.  You can't kill a process which is in kernel mode.  If it doesn't
come out, you won't be able to stop it.  It seems rather unlikely that
that's the case here, though.

Greg
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