> after trying to make an "insmod ppa" with an error (port already in use
> or somethink like that) i look my processes with "ps -aux" and i find an
> old "insmod ppa" (i do it every day at midnight) but the STAT was "D"
> with man ps : it is an 'uninterruptible sleep' process
> effectivly i can't stop it (with kill -9 pid or -SIGKILL or all the kill
> possible)
That's why it's called "uninterruptable". ;-)
Quote:> i stoped this processe with shutdown -r now
Which is the only way to get rid of it, unfortunately.
Quote:> now my questions are
> what is a "uninterruptible sleep"?
Usually, it's a process waiting for some I/O transaction to complete.
This is not a bad thing in general, unless, due to hardware problems
for example, it is _impossible_ for the transaction to ever complete.
In this case, the process just keeps waiting for a response from some
(faulty) hardware (that just _won't_ answer) forever and three days,
uninterruptable, unkillable, until you reboot.
In most cases, you'll notice some error message on shutdown, something
along the lines of "can't unmount /dev/blah, device or resource busy",
followed by a "/dev/blah was not unmounted cleanly, fsck forced" on the
next startup.
Quote:> how can i stop this sort of process?
Well, you sort of found out the answer yourself - you'll have to (dare
I say it?) reboot. ;-/
HTH,
Thomas
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