How to kill a process in uninterruptible sleep state?
From Carlos Garada Answered By John Karns, Ben Okopnik, Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Jay R. Ashworth, Robos, Jim Dennis, Ashwin N Dear answer gang: Sometimes when I mount a CD, mount hangs. ps shows it is in an “uninterruptible sleep”, and kill won’t kill it. As a result, I can not access my CD drive until I restart my computer. Is there a way to kill a process in uninterruptible sleep? Thanks! C. Garada [John K.] What I usually do is to kill the parent process, which is usually a bash shell. In many / most cases this allows killing of the errant process. However, you may run into the situation where the driver or a port is hung. In those cases, you may have no choice but to reboot. Sometimes the parent process is apt-get. I kill it, but the spawned mount remains in state “D” and I can not kill it. [Ben] Have you tried “kill -9”? This is not a good thing to do by default. but if you’ve already tried a plain “kill” (which issues a “-15”), that’s what’s left. See “man kill” for more details. Yes
