In article <df160b8f.0309251300.3e729a82@posting.google.com >,
Big Bird wrote:
> Machine 1 exports a directory via nfs (no samba or similar nonsense).
>
> On machine 2 the directory is mounted.
>
> Machine 1 goes down (hardware reset) without any nice unmounting or
> [snip]
> Now this is an unusual situation, but I'm somewhat frustrated at the

Not really. I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I have managed
to resolve the problem by bringing machine 1 back up, then umount'ing on
machine 2.

> process is sleeping uninterruptably because it is waiting for I/O --
> but what if I want to kill it anyways? How do I tell such a process to
> give up waiting for I/O? In the case of rpciod and lockd, apparently

"Uninterruptible sleep" is, unfortunately, just that. I agree, it would
seem beneficial to have a way to signal such processes and let them know
that their wait is in vain, but AFAIK the gods of Unix have decreed that
this not be so.

You could search the LKML archives (Google has numerous sources) to see
if the suggestion has come up before, and if so, what was said.
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