Unkillable process

[Doug White]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Oliver Fischer wrote:

> Hello,
>
> today one of my bashs started to allocate more and more memory. I tried
> to kill the process but I didn't succeed. The final result was a system
> panic and a lot of error messages like this one:
>
> Feb 18 13:39:43 warpgondel2 kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(12): failed
> Feb 18 13:39:43 warpgondel2 kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(9): failed
> Feb 18 13:39:43 warpgondel2 kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(5): failed
>
> I use FreeBSD 5 now for more then 8 months. During this time I have seen
> five or more unkillable processes.

This is usually caused by your I/O system going to lunch, or at least
where your swap partition is.  Another telltale is the "swap_pager:
indefinite wait buffer" message.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org