Re: init's children list is long and slows reaping children.

Oleg Nesterov
2007-04-06T09:44:25Z

On 04/06, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru> writes:
>
> > Robin Holt wrote:
> >>
> >> wait_task_zombie() is taking many seconds to get through the list.
> >> For the case of a modprobe, stop_machine creates one thread per cpu
> >> (remember big number). All are parented to init and their exit will
> >> cause wait_task_zombie to scan multiple times most of the way through
> >> this very long list looking for threads which need to be reaped.
> >
> > Could you try this patch
> >
> > http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=117337194209912
> >
> > ?
> >
> > It can't solve the whole problem, but at least an exiting kernel thread
> > won't kick init.
>
> At first glance your patch looks reasonable.
>
> Unfortunately it only applies to the rare thread that calls daemonize,
> and not also to kernel/kthread/kthread() which means it will miss many of
> our current kernel threads.

Note that a thread created by kthread_create() has ->parent == "[kthread]",
not /sbin/init (unless it was created before core_initcall). So I don't really
understand how stop_machine() creates the threads parented to init.

> For the sgi problem I doubt it is will make a difference

most probably you are right.

Oleg.