Christopher Cashell <topher-pgsql@zyp.org> writes:
> Eventually I attempted to shut it down and restart it, however that
> failed too. When I attempted to shut it down, I discovered a hung
> 'startup subprocess' that can't be killed.
This is interesting because it seems just about exactly like this
recent Red Hat bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=126885
As I commented there, I think that it must be a kernel or hardware
issue --- Postgres itself can surely not make an unkillable process.
However it's common to see processes that don't respond to kill if
they are stuck inside a kernel I/O request. That could mean either
unresponsive hardware or a kernel bug.
I wonder whether you have any similarities in hardware or Linux kernel
to the person who filed the above report?
regards, tom lane