Re: Un-killable process???

I have had the same problem when writing a driver for my custom hardware
; It's a well known problem, I found it explained in "Linux Device
Drivers" by Rubini & Corbet. (i have the french version , it's in chapter 5)
your driver should use the function "interruptible_sleep_on()" instead
of "sleep_on()" to block the process .
if you use "sleep_on()", your process will not receive any signal while
blocked and then could become "un-killable" .

bye.


Julien


Dean McBride wrote:

Hello,

I have a process I can't kill (kill -9) without rebooting the system.  I've
attempted
attaching strace, gdb, etc. to the process, but each of those task just
hang.  I
can however kill those task (strace, gdb).  I've looked through the
/proc/<pid>
area, but don't really know what I'm looking for or at!  The task seems
to be
somehow stuck on some resource, but I don't know which one or how to find
out.  I'm running with Linux 2.4.10-pre10 on a 4 processor Power PC with
512Mbytes of memory.  The process is reading data from a PMC card.

Any ideas or suggestions?  I've include some more information below!

Thanks
Dean

Here's the output from the ps command:
   74 root     root     R /opt/ds/src/lm1/bin/lm1_read -s 4 -m 255 -f 4000
-a -r -u 2 -g 1


Heres the /proc/74/status file

sh-2.03# more /proc/74/status
Name:   lm1_read
State:  R (running)
Pid:    74
PPid:   62
TracerPid:      0
Uid:    0       0       0       0
Gid:    0       0       0       0
FDSize: 256
Groups: 0
VmSize:     2580 kB
VmLck:      2580 kB
VmRSS:      2580 kB
VmData:     1128 kB
VmStk:        16 kB
VmExe:        20 kB
VmLib:      1188 kB
SigPnd: 0000000000044102
SigBlk: 0000000000000000
SigIgn: 8000000000000000
SigCgt: 0000000000004002
CapInh: 0000000000000000
CapPrm: 00000000fffffeff
CapEff: 00000000fffffeff

/proc/74/statm file

sh-2.03# more /proc/74/statm
645 645 317 17 0 628 328

--
Julien Eyries
R&D engineer
Thales Broadcast & Multimedia (ex-thomcast)
email: julien.eyries@thales-bm.com
fax: 33(0) 1 34 90 31 10
tel: 33(0) 1 34 90 31 01


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