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

Jeff Garzik
2007-04-10T07:07:23Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Apr 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
>>> 10 ? S< 0:00 [khelper]
>> That one's needed to parent the call_usermodehelper() apps. I don't think
>> it does anything else. We used to use keventd for this but that had some
>> problem whcih I forget.
>
> I think it was one of a long series of deadlocks.
>
> Using a "keventd" for many different things sounds clever and nice, but
> then sucks horribly when one event triggers another event, and they depend
> on each other. Solution: use independent threads for the events.

Nod. That's the key problem with keventd. Independent things must wait
on each other.

That's why I feel thread creation -- cheap under Linux -- is quite
appropriate for many of these situations.

Jeff