Re: [gentoo-user] unkillable processes

[Mark Knecht]

On 11/28/05, Richard Fish <bigfish@××××××××××.org> wrote:
> On 11/28/05, Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
> > kill -15 PID
> > kill -9 PID
> > killall -9 process_name
> >
> > but none worked. To make forward progress I just rebooted.
> >
> >    Is there some other way I could have tried killing this process?
>
> Nope.  Usually this means something went terribly wrong in hardware.
> Pullling a hard drive out of the system while it is running is an easy
> way to duplicate this problem, as it will cause the kernel to enter an
> interminable reset loop to try and recover.  Problems with network
> filesystems could also cause something similar.
>
> You should check dmesg output to see if the kernel is complaining
> about something.
>
> -Richard

Very strange.

1) The process (gnome-vfs-daemon) was not defunct or zombie.

2) It only happens when my wife uses the system. If it's hardware
related only she can trigger it.

3) There were absolutely no messages in /var/log/messages or dmesg.

The way this gets triggered is a bit unclear. She's working along and
then does something that causes he desktop, but not Gnome pannel, to
disappear. The machine is still alive. She can run Firefox but she
cannot lot out.

To get out of X we do Alt-Ctrl-Backspace. We then go to the console
and see that there are about 7 processes left owned by her avccount
even though she is logged out. We have found that for her to log back
in successfully we have to kill all of these processes. If processes
cannot be killed then when she tries logging back in she gets no
desktop again.

This only happens with her account. We have deleted he home directory
and rebuilt it twoce. Eventually the same thing occurs. I suspect it's
a bug in Gnome, or Gnome pannel, triggered by all the strangle little
setups she likes to do to it with drawers and transparent things.
Possibly it's a video driver issue?

Thanks,
Mark

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