On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, William L. Maltby wrote:
On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 10:04 -0800, nate wrote:
<snip>
Second question - A newly installed server consisting of CentOS 5.2, straight off the DVD, I invoke a command by hand, realize I want to kill it soon after (logged in as root). I issue ps auwx|grep name_of_command, get the PID, and issue kill -9 PID. ps auwx|grep name_of_command is still running.
The command is NOT part of any scheduled job. Why won't the process die?
Is the process state "D" or "Z" ? Frequently either of these states can trigger an unkillable process. Sometimes "Z" (zombies) can be killed but often times they can't be directly killed. And if the process is in "D" then it is stuck waiting for I/O(most often) and you have to wait for it to complete, or reboot, sometimes going to single user mode and back again works as well, and sometimes killing other processes that the stuck one depends on can sometimes free it up so it can die.
I discovered, by chance, the Xen kernel was getting in the way. I booted to the non-Xen kernel and all is well.
Scott