Unkillable process under 2.0.30

Nick Holloway (Nick.Holloway@alfie.demon.co.uk)
11 Nov 1997 19:47:09 -0000

The caching nntp proxy, nntpcache, was performing an expiry, and so
was performing chdir, stat, and unlink. I did a strace of it, and it
appeared to be working fine. However, later in the day, I realised the
machine was taking up all the CPU as system time.

So, I have a process that is running, soaking up all available CPU --
in the kernel. I can't kill it (even -9 doesn't work), attach to it
(strace, gdb). The process status is reported as running.

I was able to renice it, and checked that it didn't seem to affect the
running of other processes. This means I've left it for now, so that
I might be able to identify why.

Is there anything I can do to help identify what it is doing? I looked
at /proc/X/stat, but wchan is not set (because it isn't blocked).
I was unable to work out how to do anything useful with the EIP given
for the process.

The machine is a Dell pentium with IDE controller, ne2000 and 3c509 cards.
Full configuration available on request.

-- 
 `O O'  | Nick.Holloway@alfie.demon.co.uk  http://www.alfie.demon.co.uk/
// ^ \\ | Nick.Holloway@parallax.co.uk  http://www.parallax.co.uk/~alfie/