Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot?

[Pedro Venda (SYSADM)]

Jim Nelson wrote:
> DervishD wrote:
>
> >     Hi Gene :)
> >
> >  * Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx> dixit:
> >
> > > >   Then the children are reparented to 'init' and 'init' gets rid
> > > > of them. That's the way UNIX behaves.
> > >
> > >
> > > Unforch, I've *never* had it work that way.  Any dead process I've 
> > > ever had while running linux has only been disposable by a reboot.
> >
> >
> >
> >     Well, you know, shit happens... Anyway, could you define 'dead'?
> > Because if you're talking about zombies whose parent dies, they're
> > killable easily: just wait until init reaps them (usually in less
> > than 5 minutes since they dead). If you are talking about zombies who
> > has their parent alive, then it's a bug in the application, not the
> > kernel. In fact I wouldn't like if the kernel reaps my children
> > before I do, just in case I want to do something.
> >
> >     If you're talking about unkillable processes (those stuck in
> > disk-sleep state), you're right: only rebooting can kill them
> > (although sometimes they go out of D state and die normally). Bad
> > luck for you if any dead process you've ever had while running linux
> > has been of this kind :(
>
> I did this to myself a number of times when I was first learning Samba - 
> even an ls would become unkillable.  You couldn't rmmod smb, since it 
> was in use, and you couldn't kill the process, since it was waiting on a 
> syscall.  Ergh.

the exact same happened to me, but my case was with ntfs. zip processes 
just got stuch in "D" state because of some unhandled names... i 
couldn't kill the processes. i don't think this is an easy thing to do, 
tough it should be possible to kill -9 these processes and make them exit.

is this feasible?

regards,
pedro venda.
--

Pedro João Lopes Venda
email: pjvenda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://maxwell.rnl.ist.utl.pt

Equipa de Administração de Sistemas
Rede das Novas Licenciaturas (RNL)
Instituto Superior Técnico
http://www.rnl.ist.utl.pt
http://mega.ist.utl.pt
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