How can I kill a process in Linux when kill -9 fails?

Asked Oct 07 '22 at 16:51

Active Oct 07 '22 at 22:33

Viewed 855 times

I have a process (actually a pair of them) numbered 1234 which uses my NVIDIA GPUs. I want to kill it. I tried kill 1234; I tried kill -9 1234 I tried kill -KILL 1234 - no effect. Tried Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Z in the terminal session where the process is running - no effect. I tried killing as root - no effect. Or rather, there is some effect: The process state is no Z(ombie). But it still seems to use ~100% CPU.

Can I "kill it harder" somehow?

Notes:

The process is interacting with the CUDA driver. Trying to tell my GPU to power down then power up (using nvidia-smi) also has no effect.
Power-cycling the machine works :-(

edited Oct 07 '22 at 22:33

asked Oct 07 '22 at 16:51

einpoklum

9,515

Related: What if 'kill -9' does not work? – Kusalananda Oct 07 '22 at 16:56
@Kusalananda: Indeed, but my process does not seem to have quit, and is consuming resources - supposedly contradicting the answers there. – einpoklum Oct 07 '22 at 17:13
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5642/what-if-kill-9-does-not-work – chronic.kernel.panic Oct 07 '22 at 20:53
Driver bug? There is uninterruptible code. However this is only in the kernel. I think there were attempts to minimise it. So probably in a driver. – ctrl-alt-delor Oct 07 '22 at 22:14
@ctrl-alt-delor: Very possible. Question is, can I get around it? It turns out all subsequent processes interacting with the GPU also hang. – einpoklum Oct 07 '22 at 22:34
@chronic.kernel.panic: Yeah, what that page says is not useful in this case. – einpoklum Oct 07 '22 at 22:34

How can I kill a process in Linux when kill -9 fails?

0 Answers0