title: Process permanently stuck on D state
body: <p>I have an issue with some processes stuck in a D state on Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS. </p>
  
  <p>They have been in this state since Nov the 5th (today being December 6th). I understand these are uninterruptible sleep states often related to waiting for data from hardware such as a hard disk. This is a production server so rebooting is a very last resort, is anyone able to shed any light on what these processes might be?</p>
  
  <p>This is the output for the D state items from  <code>ps -aux</code></p>
  
  <pre><code>www-data 22851  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        D    Nov05   0:00 [2637.64]
  www-data 26306  0.0  0.0   4008    12 ?        D    Nov05   0:00 ./2.6.37
  www-data 26373  0.0  0.0   4008    12 ?        D    Nov05   0:00 ./n2
  www-data 26378  0.0  0.0   4008    12 ?        D    Nov05   0:00 ./n2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is output of  <code>ps axl | awk '$10 ~ /D/'</code> for a little more info.</p>
  
  <pre><code>0    33 22851     1  20   0      0     0 econet D    ?          0:00 [2637.64]
  1    33 26306     1  20   0   4008    12 ec_dev D    ?          0:00 ./2.6.37
  1    33 26373     1  20   0   4008    12 ec_dev D    ?          0:00 ./n2
  1    33 26378     1  20   0   4008    12 ec_dev D    ?          0:00 ./n2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to kill these? Does having processes in this state when rebooting cause any issues?</p>