unkillable processes of death (again)

From: Ian Peters (itp@gnu.org)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2000 - 09:37:37 EST


2.3.99pre5, system is a dual PII, with both SCSI and IDE devices.
It's been up for about 6 and a half days.

Anyways, I clicked on a link in Netscape, and before I knew it, I was
listening to RMS sing that "Join us now and share the software" song.
Anxious for some way to make it stop, I quickly popped up a shell and
typed "killall mpg123". Which returned Segmentation fault. Confused,
I entered "killall mpg123" once again, which had the beneficial effect
of stopping the music, but unfortunately, the killall never returned
(and I can't ^C out of it).

So, I tried to use ps to track the problem down, but ps stalls in the
middle of its output (and won't die). I've attached the end of an
strace to this mail, but the relevant part is, it stops while trying
to read /proc/644. So, I cd'd to that directory, fine, typed ls, and
ls got stuck. Ugh.

So now anything on my system that I can think of that tries to
investigate what used to be the mpg123 process is in horrible danger
of going awry. I hope that a more technical explanation can be found
other than the kernel really wanted to hear the Free Software Song.

Requests for more information and clarification welcome. Please CC me
on all replies, as I'm not subscribed to l-k.

---

stat("/proc/27472", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 open("/proc/27472/stat", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, "27472 (navigator-smoti) S 27428 "..., 511) = 207 close(7) = 0 open("/proc/27472/statm", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, "141 96 59 17 0 79 17\n", 511) = 21 close(7) = 0 open("/proc/27472/status", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, "Name:\tnavigator-smoti\nState:\tS ("..., 511) = 478 close(7) = 0 open("/proc/27472/cmdline", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, "(dns helper)\0", 2047) = 13 close(7) = 0 open("/proc/27472/environ", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, "PWD=/home/itp\0XAUTHORITY=/home/i"..., 2047) = 1546 close(7) = 0 stat("/proc/644", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 open("/proc/644/stat", O_RDONLY) = 7 read(7, <unfinished ...>

-- Ian Peters | GnuPG Key ID 5C23D20C | Those who know what's best itp@gnu.org | E584 2558 FAC3 BEAB EFAC | for us must rise and save itp@cmu.edu | FC74 CFED 7E24 5C23 D20C | us from ourselves...

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