SIGKILL and TerminateProcess

Tue Oct 29 16:13:00 GMT 2013

Hello List,
I have a question, as to why CYGWIN does not use the TerminateProcess approach when
dealing with SIGKILL sent to a process (in the manner the CYGWIN's own kill utility
does when invoked with -f)? Usually SIGKILL is expected to reliably terminate
its victim (let alone it can't be intercepted, hence, does not need any "handling"
provisions). Yet under CYGWIN, if the point of execution is found as "unsafe" in the
target process, the signal cannot be delivered quickly. Such as when the process is busy dealing with a time-consuming Windows API (the dumbest example is Sleep() ;-),
then the process will not get killed even with SIGKILL. Could CYGWIN please consider
special-casing SIGKILL to perform something similar to the force-killing of the
command-line utility?
Thanks,
Anton Lavrentiev
Contractor NIH/NLM/NCBI
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