[TriLUG] runaway cdda2wav processes ?

Jeremy P jeremyp at pobox.com
Mon Dec 3 15:15:19 EST 2001


Okay, so I decided it's time to update a couple of computers to Red Hat
Linux 7.2, and fired up xcdroast to burn the images I got off the TriLUG
mirror. :)  However, it hung after inserting a blank CD, and the
culprit appears to be cdda2wav.  I'm not sure why it was running cdda2wav
since the blank CD has no DA to be converted to WAV, but I guess that's
part of the process xcdroast uses to determine what's in the CD drive.

Anyway, now I have a runaway cdda2wav process on my desktop, using up
about 80% CPU. It won't respond to kill -15 or kill -9, which is odd --
isn't every process (except a zombie) supposed to die with kill -9 ? Also,
I noticed that "kswapd" is taking up 20% of the processor time, which is
also odd -- "free" shows plenty of physical RAM available so it shouldn't
be doing heavy swapping, right?

I had this happen one time before and rebooting fixed it, but surely
there's a better way in Linux.  I don't really care about uptime on a
workstation, but it seems silly to reboot for something like this.

I'm running kernel 2.4.4-win4lin (I know, I know) with RHL 7.1 on a Dell
Optiplex GX110.

The CD burner says this under /proc/scsi/scsi if this means anything:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
  Vendor: SONY     Model: CD-RW  CRX160E   Rev: 1.0g
  Type:   CD-ROM                           ANSI SCSI revision: 02
(it's actually an IDE burner with ide-scsi)

Thanks for any ideas,

Jeremy




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