Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot?

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Tue Nov 09 2004 - 18:33:35 EST


DervishD wrote:
Hi Bill :)

* Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> dixit:

If you are talking about others' children, then your call to
waitpid() (or wait()) failed with ECHILD: not your child.

That's what happened when I tried it a few months ago. I suppose one could try sending a SIGCHLD to the parent and see if it does something helpful.


Probably it won't do. If the zombies are there due to a signal
delivery problem, sending a SIGCHLD to the parent will (probably)
solve the problem. But the common case is that the parent is screwed
up or simply so badly programmed that the only way of getting rid of
the zombies is to kill the parent...

Wait a minute, in another message you just suggested that a SIGCHLD to init would cause the status to be reaped.

Anyway I suppose that sending the SIGCHLD won't do any harm so it
may be worth trying.

It won't hurt init, but some processes do use the SIGCHLD to trigger a wait(), which might hang the parent.

--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/