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

Oleg Nesterov
2007-04-10T16:44:55Z

On 04/10, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> I'm trying to remember what the story is now. There is a nasty
> race somewhere with reparenting, a threaded parent setting SIGCHLD to
> SIGIGN, and non-default signals that results in an zombie that no one
> can wait for and reap. It requires being reparented twice to trigger.

reparent_thread:

...

/* If we'd notified the old parent about this child's death,
* also notify the new parent.
*/
if (!traced && p->exit_state == EXIT_ZOMBIE &&
p->exit_signal != -1 && thread_group_empty(p))
do_notify_parent(p, p->exit_signal);

We notified /sbin/init. If it ignores SIGCHLD, we should release the task.
We don't do this.

The best fix I believe is to cleanup the forget_original_parent/reparent_thread
interaction and factor out this "exit_state == EXIT_ZOMBIE && exit_signal == -1"
checks.

Oleg.