Re: octave in uninterruptible state on Alpha

[Jim Van Zandt]

Francesco Potorti` <address@hidden> writes:
>one day octave
>stopped and refused to show its first prompt.  A ps revealed that
>octave was there, in uninterruptible state.  After making some tests,
>I now have some 10 octave processes in that state, and I can do
>nothing to run octave.

Neither you nor the superuser can do "kill -9 XXXX" where XXXX is the
process ID?  I thought that was a sure kill.

I assume Octave hangs waiting for some resource to become available.
A pty (pseudo-terminal), maybe.  I don't know about the Alpha.  Under
sunos, the pty(4) man page says:

     In configuring, if no optional ``count''  is  given  in  the
     specification, 16 pseudo-terminal pairs are configured.

These would be /dev/ptyp[0-9a-f].  Look for a command like "fuser"
that could tell you which are being used.  Maybe you can just make
some more, such as /dev/ptyq[0-9a-f].

Another approach is to install strace, and run Octave under that.
That should tell you which system request hangs.

                              - Jim Van Zandt