Re: [vox-tech] Zombie Processes

[Micah Cowan <miMAPScah@cowanbox.com>]

I seem to recall having trouble killing a process which I had paused
with kill -STOP...  when I kill -CONT'ed it, it then died from the
KILL signal (I think - I can't actually remember whether I used a KILL
or a TERM signal).

It would seem that (at least in Kernel 2.2, not sure of 2.4) processes
have to be "awake" to receive such signals, even unhandleable ones
like SIGKILL.

Micah

On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 02:49:56PM -0800, Jan Wynholds wrote:
> Hey all:
> 
> Just had an eeeeenteresting thing happen to me at work
> yesterday.  Here is a brief rendition of the
> occurances (oh, this is on a RHL 6.2):
> 
> 1. A win98 program that interfaces a pgsql db crashed.
> 2. The TCP handler for the db records 'freaked out'
> and tried to kill the instance that was handling the
> rec's (from the win98 box).
> 3. The kill failed, and left a bunch of <defunct>
> (zombie) processes languishing.
> 
> When I saw this, I just tried:
> 
> # kill -9 [pid]
> 
> To no avail.  So, I tried:
> 
> # kill -s 9 [pid]
> 
> Still, no dice.
> 
> So I was left with the (not so great) solution of
> restarting the machine.  This killed the zombie
> processes alright, but it seemed to me to be a M$
> approach to the problem, if anyone can shed some light
> on why or what happened, I would be grateful.  I
> looked on a linux-kerned mail list and found that this
> was a kernel bug having to do with threading.  Has
> anyone else seen this kind of thing before?  If so
> what has your solutions been?
> 
> Thanks in advance....
> 
> Jan
> 
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