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From: ron@oscvax.UUCP (Ron Janzen)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Killing processes that are sleeping with -ve priority
Message-ID: <366@oscvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Jul-85 15:46:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: oscvax.366
Posted: Fri Jul 12 15:46:01 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jul-85 17:27:58 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Ontario Science Centre, Toronto
Lines: 21

Occasionally I will run into a process that is sleeping with
a negative priority. It is immune to all forms of kill.
These processes usually occur in conjunction with the tape drive
but they have happened with ttys and a frame buffer that
we have on our system. When this happens it hangs up the respective
device. In the past I have always had to reboot the system to
unhang the device. I have also tried turning the power off to the
device in the hopes that this would kick the driver awake. I
was wondering if there is some magic (poke some magic address
in /dev/kmem, etc) I can do to tell the driver to stop being
a pain in the $%#. I am running on a VAX 750 under bsd4.1 (no source)
with a TS-11 tape drive. When I do a ps on the offending process
it tells me it is at PRI -5 and the wait channel (WCHAN) points
to a thing called _ctsbuf.

Well I have to go and reboot the system :-).
Thanks in advance for any help.
-- 
Ron Janzen
Ontario Science Centre, Toronto
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