I can not kill -9 processes

[Harvey Lindsay]

I can not kill -9 several processes. I have 4 processes that will not go away. Every time I launch the same Program it gets locked and will not go away. Is there a way to flush out the programs with out a reboot. I have tried all the kill switches. I really do not want to reboot. The powermt program is EMC powerpath controller for fail over of the fiber connections to a EMC san. Below is a list of the stubborn program.

ps -ef | grep power
root 2343 1 0 Sep 26 ? 0:00 powermt check
root 4386 1 0 Sep 26 ? 0:00 powermt check
root 26459 1 0 08:27:36 ? 0:00 powermt -dispaly
root 5745 1 0 10:10:47 ? 0:00 powermt check
root 15778 15244 1 08:24:20 pts/tj 0:00 grep power

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

If kill -9 can't do it, only a boot or the poower switch will do it.

There are no alternatives.

SEP

[Pete Randall]

Harvey,

If a kill -9 won't get rid of them, they must be waiting for I/O to complete. They're un-signalable in this state. The only way to get rid of them is to somehow force the I/O to complete, but that's probably not possible.


Pete

[Muthukumar_5]

Some process called Zombie / defunct process so that they can not be killed with kill -9 command too.

Wait for system there is a chance that process whose PPID will be 1 then it will be removed from system some time later.

But only good way is to,

1> shutdown / reboot

HTH.

[Muthukumar_5]

A good related discussion on this,
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=705061

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Harvey,

Try -l in that ps command - EX: ps -fl | grep power. Then look at the PRI column - IF it's between 128 <-> 153 then it's in the kernel range & it's totally unkillable because it's unsignalable as Pete point's out.
But, hey, if it's not eating up CPU time & it's not sitting on gobs of memory - who cares?

My 2 cents,
Jeff

[Prashant Zanwar_4]

Try doing stop on your init script of powermt from /sbin/init.d from console. Look out if it pops up any messages.
Or
In my hope also these are processes waiting for parent to exit..Or it can be deadlock situation where they will never get the required resource and they are hung. Your next reboot will take care of them..

Hope it helps
Prashant

[Harvey Lindsay]

Thank You all for you help and a quick reply.

[Ted Buis]

If powermt is in /etc/inittab then it may be respawned, so kill -9 will kill the one PID, but another will take its place. Do the ps -ef| grep power and then kill -9 "PID" and then another ps -ef | grep power to see if the PID was respawned. If that is happening, then comment out the line in /etc/inittab that respawns the process.