Ultrix tape job is unkillable!

[Kenneth Almquist]

Patrick Wolfe asks:
> Is this a problem in the device driver, kernel process management, or
> something else entirely?  It seems that if an event is being waited for,
> there ought to be a way to have the OS force the event to occur or fail.

The basic problem is that the device driver should be programmed to time
out after a while if it fails to receive an interrupt.  But UN*X doesn't
make this particularly easy to do, and a lot of device drivers don't
bother.  Perhaps a variant of the sleep routine with an additional
argument specifying a timeout would encourage writers of device drivers
to do things right.
				Kenneth Almquist