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Date:      Tue, 3 Nov 1998 09:45:44 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Dowdal <jdowdal@destiny.erols.com>
To:        "John C. Place" <jcplace@ibm.net>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: df hangs on 2.2.6-BETA
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9811030834390.16960-100000@destiny.erols.com>
In-Reply-To: <19981102210818.01660@ka3tis.com>

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On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, John C. Place wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 02, 1998 at 05:23:55PM -0700, Chad R. Larson wrote:
> > This raises a missing feature I've long thought Unix needed.  There
> > should be a "kill with extreme prejudice".  Something that will go
> > through the kernel process tables and just remove all evidence the
> > process ever existed.
> > 
> You mean kill -9 .... doesn't do the trick?? I always thought that was kill 
> with extreme prejudice.
> 

I have noticed on several unixes (all based on BSD) such as SunOS 4,
Ultrix, and Digital Unix, that processes in 'D' (disk wait) state in 'top'
will not die with kill -9.  This frequently occurs when a hard-mounted NFS
filesystem goes down.  The processes will remember that they were killed
and die if the filesystem ever comes back up; otherwise they will waste
resources (swap and process table but not CPU).

Assuming the process cannot be unblocked, i have found the only way to get
rid of them is to reboot.  On SunOS, shutdown would frequently complain
that there were processes which would not die.  A few times it did NOT
give me this message, which implies that they could be killed in these
rare cases by shutting down to single-user then going back to multi-user.  
This will allow you to preserve your long uptime


John


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