Daniel Stonier wrote:I've been having problems lately with my dvd player - seems to be locking
up frequently on dvd's in a movie and repetitiously sitting in the one spot trying to read without success.Admittedly some of the problems are due to dvd's with scratches, but it
seems to do it far more frequently now the player is getting a little aged.
Anyway, my question is this - how do you kill it? Only way I know of currently is to reboot the computer. Killing the process often doesn't work and if it does occasionally, the dvd hardware itself still keeps beating itself senseless.
No-one seems to have answered this one, so I'll see what I can do.
Firstly, you do know about kill -9, don't you? This will kill anything that can be killed.
If that doesn't work, then the chances are that the process is in the middle of a system call (and is into kernel mode). When this happens, the signal is only acted upon when the system call returns. If you have suitably dodgy hardware (and it sounds like you do), the system call may not actually return.
Note that this does not mean that the kernel freezes. When a synchronous call is made that requires a hard disk read, Linux expects to go away for at least 10 ms (more like 100 ms with a CD or DVD), and wait for the storage adapter to notify the kernel (with an IRQ and suitable messages: note that I'm assuming DMA).
That's just what happens here. It's just that the DVD never returns the data, but doesn't return a read error, so the kernel remembers the outstanding request indefinitely.
This is probably due to your DVD-ROM drive failing, although it could be an oddity of the IDE adapter. Do you find the same symptoms with CD-ROMs? How about DVD-ROMs? (DVDs are a lot harder for a marginal DVD-ROM drive to read, but there's not much difference to the IDE side of things).
HTH,
James.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, kill -9 wasn't working and you were spot on
about the kernel behaviour. The rest of the system still operates fine - only
the process involved and the dvd player lock up.
I'm not sure if the same problem crops up with CD-ROMs. Haven't seen it, but
I haven't exactly thrashed the drive for very long with CD-ROMS to have seen it
yet either. This is only a recent problem with the DVD player so I dont think it is a
problem with anything else in the machine, probably just an aging player
that will need to be replaced.
Thanks, Daniel.
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