Kill an uninteruptable process

[Alexey Fadyushin]

'D' state of the process is the "Uninterruptible sleep" state. This 
usually mean that the process has requested some operation which should 
be done by the kernel (for example I/O operation) and that operation was 
suspended in the kernel for some reason. Usually the operation is 
suspended until some external event, for example, the interrupt from the 
harddrive when the read/write operation completed. If the process is in 
the 'D' state for the long time (e.g. minutes) this means that something 
wrong happened with the hardware or the kernel data structures 
(sometimes this is due to some bug in the kernel).
There is no way to kill process stuck in the kernel ('D') state. You 
should either reboot or just forget about that process and allow it to 
be in the 'D' state indefinitely.

Alexey B. Fadyushin
Brainbench MVP for Linux.
http://www.brainbench.com

Hugo Dominguez wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> How in the name of sweet Jesus do I kill a process in "D" state.
> I have tried the death penalty, kill -9, but it is still listed in ps -aux.
> I was installing rpm packages over NFS. I lost NFS during the
> installation. I remounted the pertinent NFS directory, no change.
> 
> -Hugo
> 
>