tlug: Uninterruptible sleeping processes

[Neil Booth <NeilB@example.com>]

The other day, I had a couple of these. They were caused by Netscape
accessing my floppy drive, and anyway something went wrong and Netscape
was just waiting.

So I went to bash, and did a "cd /mnt/floppy" (I think) and bash hanged
as well waiting for the floppy.

Try as I might, I couldn't kill the netscape and bash processes, as they
were uninterruptible. Kill -9 didn't work as root either. Meanwhile, my
floppy drive was unusable.

So I decided to reboot, and the shutdown stalled on the part where it
unmounts local filesystems (clearly the still-mounted /mnt/floppy was
the problem).

How do I get these processes out of such a sleep? Or is the situation
unrecoverable, something having gone badly awry in the kernel?

Neil.
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