Is there any way to kill or end a process in "disk sleep"

Question

I am running Linux Mint 18.2 with KDE Plasma. Recently I noticed that most of the times I copy large files to removable drives the process hangs just before finish.

I opened KSysGuard and saw that the process of file.so is in disk sleep.
When this happens the process seems not receiving any kill or end signal. I decided to reboot, opened a terminal in Konsole and ran reboot command. But the reboot also got stuck in the middle! I had to press the power button and force shutdown my laptop.

Now I want to know is it impossible to kill or end a process that is in I/O Sleep state ?

Solution

If a process is in an uninterruptible sleep state, then no, you cannot kill or otherwise end the process until it exits that state. While in that state, the process has invoked a system call on the kernel, and the kernel code executing on the behalf of the process has blocked the process waiting for some event to happen.

Note that this question may be a duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/q/223644/5161900

Comments

[Admin]

For some time I'm experiencing a problem where processes end up in disk sleep state for a longer period, and dropping caches with echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches gets them out of it most of the time. I don't know why that is, I suspect a multi-core deadlock problem. Maybe it helps in your case, too.