>> They don't vanish, they get reparented to init(8) which then wakes >> up and reaps them. > That probably would work, approximately,
Well, it does work, to at least a first approximation. > but isn't what's supposed to happen when a child's parent is ignoring > SIGCHLD - the child should skip zombie state, and simply be cleaned > up. And how is "reparent to init" not an acceptable means of implementing that? > The difference would be detectable if init were sent a SIGSTOP > (assuming that isn't one which would cause a system panic) I don't think it would panic, but I think that, if it really does stop init, it's a bug that it does so. I thought I'd seen some code that rendered init immune to SIGKILL and possibly SIGSTOP too (maybe by forcing them into init's blocked-signals set? I forget). But I can't seem to find it now. > so it would stop reaping children (temporarily) - processes of the > type in question should not be showing up as zombies. Right, they shouldn't be. But init shouldn't be stopped, either. Similarly, I think it should be impossible to ptrace init, and I have a fuzzy memory that it was on at least one system I tried it on. I'll be poking around a bit more. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
