kill kill ...

[Fletcher Robinson]

I have a communications program running in the background on a 4D70GT
3.1G. It performs DMA transferes through a device driver written by SGI
for a VMIC VME-HSD board. The SGI is MASTER; a VME based 1750 is the
slave. During a I/O operation, if I attempt to EXAMINE global ram through
a 1750 debugger, my communications program HANGS. It won't dump core and
it will not catch any interupt SIGNALS(such as a ^c). The only way I can
recover is to REBOOT the SGI. I can not even use KILL <###>; I suppose
this is because UNIX will not allow removal of a process doing I/O.
Does anyone know how I might prevent this from occurring OR at least
find a mechanism to "kill" the process when it hangs without rebooting?