From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 9 08:58:34 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id IAA27986 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 9 Apr 1997 08:58:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from silvester.zoom.es (root@irc.zoom.es [195.76.150.4]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA27976 for ; Wed, 9 Apr 1997 08:58:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from zoom106.zoom.es (zoom106.zoom.es [195.76.150.106]) by silvester.zoom.es (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA05431; Wed, 9 Apr 1997 17:58:09 +0200 Message-Id: <199704091558.RAA05431@silvester.zoom.es> Comments: Authenticated sender is From: "Jesus A. Mora Marin" To: lutz@muc.de (Lutz Albers) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 17:51:47 +0000 Subject: Re: Becoming a daemon the long way... Reply-to: amora@zoom.es CC: questions@freebsd.org Priority: normal In-reply-to: <199704090839.KAA19213@tavari.muc.de> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v2.50) Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi, Lutz! Thanks for replying. > I zombie is a process, which has ended, but for which the exit code has not > been fetchted by the parent process. As long as the parent process lives, > so will the zombie. Agree. > If a process exists which has has spawed child > processes, then these processes will be reassigned to process-id 1 > (init). init will (hopefully) read the exit codes for all exited > processes. That's the really interesting point. Theorically every process whose parent exits without waiting for it to die, would be inherited by init. Otherwise the child process will become a zombie when it dies. In my own experience an ICL DS-90 system, running SysVR4, generates a large number of zombies when it goes REALLY short of memory -and probably of CPU-. This is annoying, since you've got your process table plagued with these nasty guys. Again, are there kernel-related conditions -say race conditions, I don't know- that makes a system prone to generate zombies? Has this been observed in FreeBSD? See you! ---- Jesus A. Mora Marin, MD (aka EA7HAC, ex-EC7DVE) Email: amora@zoom.es