Re: [gentoo-user] Die, process! Die!

[Michael Sullivan]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 11:39 -0700, Richard Fish wrote:
> On 11/3/06, Alan McKinnon <alan@××××××××××××××××.za> wrote:
> > On Friday 03 November 2006 06:44, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > > On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 07:48:58PM -0700, Richard Fish wrote
> > >
> > > > If -9 doesn't work, it means your kernel is hungup, and yeah,
> > > > you'll have to reboot to fix.
> > >
> > >   Where does kill -15 fit in?
> >
> > signal 15 is SIGTERM, and the default for kill. The thread is about
> > unkillable processes, meaning those that don't go away with kill or
> > kill -15
>
> Just to expand on this a bit...
>
> SIGTERM can be caught, blocked, or ignored by a process.  It is
> basically asking the _process_ to "quit now!".
>
> SIGKILL cannot be caught, blocked, or ignored by a process.  In fact,
> no user-space code is even executed for SIGKILL.  It is basically a
> request to the kernel to "wipe this thing from memory!".
>
> So if SIGKILL doesn't work, that usually means that the process has
> allocated some resource in the kernel that now cannot be freed.  An
> example would be files open on an NFS server (mounted with the 'hard'
> option), with dirty buffers needing to be flushed, but the NFS server
> cannot be reached.  SIGKILL would attempt to close those files, which
> would attempt to flush out those buffers, which would not work.
> Another example would be a buggy driver and a hung device (seen this
> with ipw3945d on my own system!)
>
> -Richard

So how would I issue a SIGKILL?

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