How to stop 'uninterruptible' process on Linux?

linux signals sigabrt kill-process sigkill
Tilo Prütz picture Tilo Prütz · Apr 20, 2009 · Viewed 47.8k times · Source

I have a VirtualBox process hanging around which I tried to kill (KILL/ABORT) but without success. The parent pid is 1 (init).

top shows the process as D which is documented as "uninterruptible sleep".

strace shows up nothing.

How can I get rid of this? It prevents me from unloading the VirtualBox kernel driver to load a newer one.

Answer

jpalecek picture jpalecek · Apr 20, 2009

Simple answer: you cannot.

Longer answer: the uninterruptable sleep means the process will not be woken up by signals. It can be only woken up by what it's waiting for. When I get such situations eg. with CD-ROM, I usually reset the computer by using suspend-to-disk and resuming.

Related questions

What killed my process and why?

My application runs as a background process on Linux. It is currently started at the command line in a Terminal window. Recently a user was executing the application for a while and it died mysteriously. The text: Killed was on …

Read More
What's the best way to send a signal to all members of a process group?

I want to kill a whole process tree. What is the best way to do this using any common scripting languages? I am looking for a simple solution.

Read More
How to capture Control+D signal?

I want to capture the Ctrl+D signal in my program and write a signal handler for it. How can I do that? I am working on C and using a Linux system.

Read More