Re: kill: cannot kill some processes

[William T Wilson <fluffy@snurgle.org>]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Ron Peterson wrote:

> > away.  They don't consume any CPU time, or any other resources other than
> > the slot in the process table and the less than 1K of memory required to
...
> Not entirely true.  Init can inherit enough zombie processes that it
> hits its process limit (1024, if I remember correctly).  Can you

Well, like I said, they do still take up the slot in the process table.

Zombies that *have* been inherited by init go away - it's those that are
still waiting for their parent process to check their status that pile up.  
Init itself doesn't have any limit on the number of zombies it can clean
up, otherwise it would be a problem with any long uptime system.

> 'shutdown'?  Nope.  Not unless you can free up a slot.  And if
> something's going haywire and spawning zombies quickly, this can be a
> problem.

Linux reserves processes for root so unless your haywire program is
running as root you are at least partly shielded from this.  
control-alt-delete should still be able to reboot the system in such a
case (or login as root on the console), if it comes to that.

> Not a common occurance, though...

This is true :}