Killing a Hung Virtual Console

This tip shows you how to restore a hung virtual console (without rebooting). To do this, you need the lsof tool.

Using lsof, find the login processes of the hung console.

Code Listing 1: Example: (hung console is /dev/vc/3)

# lsof /dev/vc/3 
COMMAND   PID  USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME 
login    7114  root    0u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3 
login    7114  root    1u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3 
login    7114  root    2u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3 
zsh     30630 david    0u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3 
zsh     30630 david    1u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3 
zsh     30630 david    2u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3 
zsh     30630 david   10u   CHR    4,3        17 /dev/vc/3

Kill the processes associated with this login and the console should respawn.

Code Listing 2: Killing the virtual console processes

# kill -9 7114 30630

From http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20031124-newsletter.xml