A tar process that won't die!

Lincoln Peters lincoln_peters at hotmail.com
Thu Apr 4 10:38:17 PST 2002


This is all happening on my local hard disk, and tar has using about 65% of 
my Athlon/1GHz CPU for the last 16 hours or so.  Maybe I should just reboot 
the darn thing.


>From: Mitch Patenaude <mrp at sonic.net>
>Reply-To: <talk at nblug.org>
>To: <talk at nblug.org>
>Subject: Re: A tar process that won't die!
>Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 10:20:20 -0800
>
>Assuming that the problem is something simple like you don't have
>permission to kill the process, then the problem is that the process
>isn't in a state where it "CAN'T" die.
>
>Processes in Unix (and Linux) can be running in one of two modes.
>User-mode is where most of your code runs, and is interuptable, and can
>be killed.  But a process can also run in kernel mode.  This usually
>happens when you're interacting with hardware, or you've called a system
>call (open(2), write(2), read(2), fork(2), etc.) which needs to work on
>stuff inside the kernel.  While in kernel mode, a process can't be
>killed, because it would compromise system integrity.
>So, if tar can't be killed, it's likely that it's running in kernel
>mode, and given the nature of tar, it's probably stuck in an I/O call.
>As soon as it returns from that call, it will die, but that might be a
>while, maybe never if there is a problem with the driver.
>
>All this doesn't point directly to an answer, but it might give you
>someplace to look.  If it were merely writing a very long buffer using
>write(2), then it might eventually finish.  If however, the io call is
>blocked because of some external factor, say a zip disk which has been
>removed, and the driver is waiting for the drive to signal ready, or
>something like that, then maybe you can resolve it by figuring out what
>the process is hung up on.
>
>Or... just reboot.. and that will solve the problem. :-)
>
>    -- Mitch
>



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