Re: [ham] Re: Gracefully killing kswapd, or any kernel thread

[Kristis Makris <kristis.makris@asu.edu>]

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 15:20 -0400, linux-os (Dick Johnson) wrote:

> Because it's now defunct <Z>, a zombie, waiting for somebody to
> reap its return status. You are almost there, you need to issue
> the kernel equivalent of waitpid() (sys_waitpid) to grab that
> status and throw it away. That's what the code I showed you
> did when it would shut down and remove a module that had
> a kernel thread.

It turns out I had to port reparent_to_init() from 2.4 to 2.2 to get it
going. issuing a sys_wait4 wasn't enough. Apparently there was no way
for the built-in kernel threads to exit at all in the first place. I
hope 2.6 at least issues a reparent_to_init in kernel_thread().