Messages in this thread | | | From | Gene Heskett <> | Subject | Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot? | Date | Wed, 3 Nov 2004 14:26:23 -0500 |
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On Wednesday 03 November 2004 14:06, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: >On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 13:53:39 EST, Gene Heskett said: >> On Wednesday 03 November 2004 12:44, DervishD wrote: >> > Then the children are reparented to 'init' and 'init' gets >> > rid of them. That's the way UNIX behaves. >> >> Unforch, I've *never* had it work that way. Any dead process I've >> ever had while running linux has only been disposable by a reboot. > >The problem likely isn't the true "zombie" - the only thing that > *those* processes have left is a process table entry to save the > exit code for a wait() syscall that might not happen anytime soon. > And unless you have hundreds of them sitting around causing > pressure on the 32K process limit, they're probably not a big > problem. > >More likely, what you're looking at is some process that has gone > down into the kernel on some syscall or other and gotten blocked. > Since signals aren't delivered until it returns, it ends up > "unkillable". > >Traditionally, a common cause for such wedging was a lost/misplaced > interrupt from an I/O operation, so a read()/write()/ioctl() call > wouldn't return because the device hadn't reported it completed. > (tape drives were notorious for this). Often, power-cycling the I/O > device would cause an unsolicited interrupt to be generated, which > would clear the "waiting for interrupt" issue and allow the process > to return....
Well, since the "device", a bt878 based Haupagge tv card is sitting in a pci socket, thats even more drastic than a reboot.
-- Cheers, gene gheskett at wdtv dot com 99.28% setiathome rank, not too bad for a WV hillbilly - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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