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

["Pedro Venda (SYSADM)" <pjvenda@rnl.ist.utl.pt>]

Jim Nelson wrote:
> DervishD wrote:
> 
>>     Hi Gene :)
>>
>>  * Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@verizon.net> 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@rnl.ist.utl.pt
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
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