22.3. Interruptible and Uninterruptible Process Sleep States

We need to add a proviso to our earlier statement that SIGKILL and SIGSTOP always act immediately on a process. At various times, the kernel may put a process to sleep, and two sleep states are distinguished:

• TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE: The process is waiting for some event. For example, it is waiting for terminal input, for data to be written to a currently empty pipe, or for the value of a System V semaphore to be increased. A process may spend an arbitrary length of time in this state. If a signal is generated for a process in this state, then the operation is interrupted and the process is woken up by the delivery of a signal. When listed by ps(1), processes in the TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE state are marked by the letter S in the STAT (process state) field.

• TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE: The process is waiting on certain special classes of event, such as the completion of a disk I/O. If a signal is generated for a process in this state, then the signal is not delivered until the process emerges from this state. Processes in the TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE state are listed by ps(1) with a D in the STAT field.