[plug] zombie GDM processes

[Bernard Blackham]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 10:49:53AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Of course, you can't kill a zombie process (WHY?!?) so it was
> reboot time... *sigh*.

If you kill it's parent, then it'll die automagically - which is a
problem when it's parent process is init. In this latter case,
something is seriously afoul.

> Also, if there's any way to force a zombified daemon to release a 
> socket, I'd love to hear about it. This isn't the first time I've had a 
> problem caused by a zombie daemon and had to reboot the server. This 
> just /can't/ happen to the "real" UNIXes, so I'd love to hear how they 
> deal with it.

AFAIK, zombie's should be cleaned up either when their parents do so
(by calling wait*()), or when their parents die. Processes who are
spawned from init should be cleaned up, and not zombify. If this
doesn't happen, then I'd say init (or the kernel) has a bug...

What does the output of `ps awux -H` show the parent of the zombie
process to be? If it's not init, kill it :)

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham 
 bernard at blackham dot com dot au