[kde-freebsd] unkillable multithreaded processes stuck in `STOP' state

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Michael Nottebrock wrote:

> On Thursday, 21. October 2004 21:23, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > This happened twice already -- first with KMail and now with Kontact.
> > A process crashes as usual (KDE's 3.3.0 release was of unusually low
> > quality), and seems to go away, except it does not. It stays in the
> > `STOP' (according to top(1)) or in the `T' (as per ps(1)) state and
> > can not be killed -- neither with -CONT, nor with -KILL.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > This is all, probably, due to something in KDE's attempts to capture
> > crashes and collect backtraces for better bug reports. But whatever bugs
> > they may have there, having an unkillable process -- of any kind -- worries
> > me greatly. Is this a known issue, or is a PR warranted?
> 
> There have been no similar reports (to my knowledge) and I haven't seen
> anything similar on either 4.x or 5.x (I don't run 6-CURRENT). 

Actually, I recall seeing a similar problem about 14 months ago on
5-CURRENT.  I believe that when a program crashed, its SIGSEGV handler
would fork and attach gdb to its parent in order to generate a stack
trace.  I didn't have the opportunity to try and track it down, but I also
don't remember seeing it in the last six months.  It could be because KDE
programs crash less for me as opposed to that the bug leading to the wedge
has been fixed.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research