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Date:      08 Dec 1997 13:37 EST
From:      "Andrew Atrens" <atrens@nortel.ca>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   dealing with zombies
Message-ID:  <199712082025.MAA07048@hub.freebsd.org>

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Hi All,

I'm eval'ing Wordperfect-7.0-for-Linux on `FreeBSD 3.0-971012-SNAP'  and am
seeing lots of zombies:

 1446  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1460  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpgmk5)
 1461  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpspell)
 1462  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpspell)
 1467  ??  Z      0:00.00  (wpp7)
 1471  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpspell)
 1472  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpspell)
 1473  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpspell)
 1513  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1514  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1531  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1532  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1533  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1543  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 1551  ??  Z      0:00.00  (xwpthes)
 
As I understand, the root cause is that (xwp) is failing to reap dead children. 
However, the children *do* get reaped when I exit xwp... it seems that
as long as xwp is running, no reaping is done, and the zombies accumulate...:(

What I'm wondering is:

i.   Is this a fault/feature of the app (xwp), the linux emulation code, or
     the kernel (in a larger sense), and
ii.  are there any *good* workarounds. ( I seem to recall some discussion about
     a tunable kernel parm for auto-reap or some such thing? )


Cheers,

Andrew.




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