Trouble killing processes in SysV/AT

[Wolf Paul]

Can anyone enlighten me as to what causes a process to become "immortal"
in System VR2,  or Microport UNIX System V/AT, to be more specific?

I have encountered this a number of times, where it would be impossible
even for root to kill a process; if the parent process of the "immortal"
process is killed, the child attaches itself to init, PID 1.

The only way to get rid of such an immortal process seems to be to reboot,
which is rather drastic.

What causes a process to refuse to die? I thought signal 9 (kill) could
not be intercepted or ignored?

Any comments welcome.

Wolf Paul
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