-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 01 April 2003 23:17, Mariano Kamp wrote: > Hi Nicolas,
> Oh really? Lol, ok I will take that into consideration in the future. > To be serious again, what should I do in such a case? Reboot the machine > would be the only other option I could think of and that reminds me too > much of the other os. > I've seen that a process id of "4" hints to an important system process > and top also showed that the cpu was eaten up by a system process, so I > understood that the process might be important, but I issued sync as a > precaution and then tried to kill the process. Wouldn't that be enough > precaution for most cases, I mean better than rebooting? For when you're experimenting, yes, it should be. I'm not sure that it actually works for journaling filesystems like ReiserFS or Ext3, though. > Until kill -9 doesn't seem to take effect I believed in kill -9 as the > last resort which will eventually kill a process. This doesn't seem to > the case. SIGKILL *cannot* be trapped by a process, and always terminates the process immediately. However, there is one case where it doesnt't - when the process is currently running a syscall, or otherwise is in kernel context. Sometime syscalls take forever, which is annoying. That said, kernel processes - generally anything with a really low PID and a name starting with 'k' - are always in kernel context. Thus, they cannot be killed, which is good since if they could be your system would execute HCF immediately. > > > Any idea what this process does? > > > > STFW. http://lwn.net/2001/0726/a/ugly.php3 > > In short: That is, as the name suggests, a kernel daemon handling soft > > IRQs which hannot be handled at the spot. > > But something seems to flood my systems with "soft irqs". Take a look at /proc/interrupts when that is happening. Under the CPU0 column, one number will be large - and probably increasing rapidly. Take a note of which driver is responsible, which you can see to the right of it, and let us know. Oh, and you might want to unload said driver. - -- Some people only open up to tell you that they're closed. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+jJDu9OlFkai3rMARAvDuAJ9M2UBrLLOv11xJtwdFG55sibqoVQCgrna7 6DCkQt3c+bwIqRs4s6Ami5c= =NzDV -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
