Messages in this thread | | | From | Måns Rullgård <> | Subject | Re: gzip zombie / spawned from init | Date | Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:32:33 +0200 |
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Bart Hartgers <bart@etpmod.phys.tue.nl> writes:
> Nico Schottelius wrote: >> Hello! >> I wrote an init replacement (cinit), which is now in the beta-phase. >> The only problem I do have currently is that when calling >> 'loadkeys dvorak' directly from init (without a shell or anything) >> it will leave behind a gzip zombie (which was forked by loadkeys). >> Now my question is: Is that a problem of loadkeys or from my init >> and what could be the reasons that it's still there? > > Not really a kernel issue but: > > Yes and no. If a parent exits before its child, the child is > reparented to init. loadkeys probably doesn't wait properly for gzip > to finish. > >> cinit forks() loadkeys and does waitpid() for it. There is no > > loadkeys zombie, only gzip. > > Use waitpid(-1,...) or wait(...) to wait on all childeren in your > init. gzip will become a child of cinit.
In fact, init must reap any zombies that are reparented to it. Otherwise, the system will sooner or later run out of PIDs. There are a lot of misbehaving programs out there, and even if they were all well-behaved, they could be killed before having waited for their children, leaving zombies behind.
-- Måns Rullgård mru@inprovide.com
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