Why page-in a SIGKILL-ed process?

From: Mikhail Teterin <mi+kde_at_aldan.algebra.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:00:48 -0400
Hello!

I just had a nasty experience. gvim went crazy and accumulated over 4Gb
of virtual memory (I'm using amd64).

My system slowed down quite a bit and I SIGKILL-ed the process. Despite
my repeated SIGKILL-ing, the process did not go away for a few minutes.

According to top, it's state during the ordeal was something like:

17850 mi          1 -16    0  4158M  1118M wdrain 1   0:06  6.10% vim

The question is: Why bother with paged-out parts of the process, when it
is already doomed by SIGKILL?

Shouldn't the pagefault-handling be interrupted by the delivery of this
(pseudo-)signal to ensure instant death without the disk-thrashing
agony?

	-mi
Received on Fri Oct 21 2005 - 13:00:50 UTC

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