Re: command line reset?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2001 at 04:21:34PM +0100 or thereabouts, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote:
> hobbit aloss ukuu org uk (2001-03-03 at 2342.51 +0000):

(killing things with 'top' and the 'k' key)
> > There are some programs you don't want to do this to. I have never 
> > dared try it in Linux, but it used to be possible on some old UNIXes 
> > to kill off 'init', for example. 'init' is the ultimate parent process: 
> > when that dies, everything does. I would assume you can't do this, but 
> > I wouldn't bet my filesystem on it :) And you might be running something
> > not-Linux, and I have no clue what other UNIXen do there. 
> 
> Under Linux too, at least via SysReq keycombos (Alt + SysReq + L), and
> quoting "'l' Send a SIGKILL to all processes, INCLUDING init. (Your
> system will be non-functional after this.". AKA Danger, read the docs
> and find better solutions (like reboot after syncing and unmounting).
> 
> Maybe someday I will try to nuke init via kill, top or similar after
> remounting read only, and in a non RAID system, cos last time I did a
> fast reboot on a RAID system it had to recheck the disk (RAID level,
> not filesystem level, but not fun anyway).

I checked (briefly) on this. Apparently you shouldn't be able to 
kill init (and a few other things) via top on Linux. The magic sysreq
keys are a separate story.

I am still not going to try it to find out though.

Telsa