killing a stuck "D" process

[Dotan Cohen]

On 7/29/05, Damian Menscher <menscher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Gaspar Bakos wrote:
> 
> > We are trying to kill a process that is "stuck", and we have found no
> > way to kill it yet.
> > We tried kill with many signals, including 'kill -9', and also removing
> > forcedly the 'st' module on which this nasty tar is running.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> > ------
> > 21586 ?        D      0:14 tar tvf /dev/nst0
> > PPid:   1
> 
> You have three options:
> 
> o Wait for it to finish on its own (may never happen if it's trying to
>    access a hardware device that no longer exists).
> 
> o Ignore it -- it's not using resources anyway.
> 
> o Kill its parent.  In your case, the parent is init, so this is
>    equivalent to rebooting.
> 
> Damian Menscher

What would cause a process to get so stuck that it could not be
killed? I just want to know before I fall into that trap myself.

Dotan Cohen
http://song-lirics.com/sl/index.php
Song Lirics