attack of the zombies

Bakul Shah bakul at bitblocks.com
Sun Nov 12 10:55:27 PST 2006


About a week or so ago I updated -current and now linux
binaries don't seem to collect all zombie processes.
Eventually the maxproc limit is reached and further forks
fail so that you can't even do ps (of course, dealing
sensibly with such errors is another problem with most
programs but that is a separate discussion).  Work around is
killing linux programs to allow init to kill the zombies.

This happens with skype, firefox and opera and may be more.
I reinstalled linux_base-fc-4_9 and all ports depending on it
-- all updated yesterday.  The problem persists even with
yesterday's -current.  This problem showed up sometime
between Oct 6 and Nov 6.  One significant change I see during
this time is the treatment of KSE.  But presence or absence
of nooption KSE does not seem to affect this problem.  BTW,
linux emulation is loaded as a module.

Also note that the old problem of linux-* programs gobbling
up lots of memory is still present.  For example, FreeBSD
opera uses 96MB while Linux opera on FreeBSD needs 236MB + 48
zombies to displaying exact same 24 pages (same session file
and *just* after starting!).

Is this a known problem?  Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks!


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