Killing processes that are sleeping with -ve priority

[Ron Janzen]

Occasionally I will run into a process that is sleeping with
a negative priority. It is immune to all forms of kill.
These processes usually occur in conjunction with the tape drive
but they have happened with ttys and a frame buffer that
we have on our system. When this happens it hangs up the respective
device. In the past I have always had to reboot the system to
unhang the device. I have also tried turning the power off to the
device in the hopes that this would kick the driver awake. I
was wondering if there is some magic (poke some magic address
in /dev/kmem, etc) I can do to tell the driver to stop being
a pain in the $%#. I am running on a VAX 750 under bsd4.1 (no source)
with a TS-11 tape drive. When I do a ps on the offending process
it tells me it is at PRI -5 and the wait channel (WCHAN) points
to a thing called _ctsbuf.

Well I have to go and reboot the system :-).
Thanks in advance for any help.
-- 
Ron Janzen
Ontario Science Centre, Toronto
...!{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!oscvax!ron