I'm stuck with a problem I don't know how to solve ... if any
kernel guru is so kind? :)
The USB module, when loaded, spawns a thread. This thread sits
there idle doing nothing until it's told to poll a hub or listen to
changes from it. I have no problem creating this thread with
kernel_thread(,,CLONE_FS|CLONE_FILES|CLONE_SIGHAND). Easy. When the
module unloads it exits ok, etc ...
BUT when that thread detects a change in a hub, it spawns yet
another thread which will handle those changes. No problem calling
kernel_thread(,,0), but when the function exits the thread goes
zombie.
Attending to what the docs on kernel_thread() say at
asm/unistd.h:
/*
* This is the mechanism for creating a new kernel thread.
*
* NOTE! Only a kernel-only process(ie the swapper or direct descendants
* who haven't done an "execve()") should use this: it will work within
* a system call from a "real" process, but the process memory space will
* not be free'd until both the parent and the child have exited.
*/
static inline pid_t kernel_thread(int (*fn)(void *), void * arg, unsigned long flags)
{
long retval;
__asm__ __volatile__(
"movl %%esp,%%esi\n\t"
"int $0x80\n\t" /* Linux/i386 system call */
.
.
.
It clearly seems I'm doing the second thing (call form a
"real" process within a syscall), so it even sounds logical what's
happening.
My question is: is there anyway to get rid of the zombies?
(when polling, the thread is created each three seconds to do the
polling, and that's a lot of zombie processes to care about).
Or better, what am I doing wrong? I used kernel_thread()
because I need to share the memory spaces ...
TIA! :)
--Linux-USB! http://peloncho.fis.ucm.es/~inaky/USB.html - - Inaky Perez Gonzalez -- PGP pubkey fingerprint - inaky@peloncho.fis.ucm.es -- 8E 34 3A 62 64 99 E2 44 - http://peloncho.fis.ucm.es/~inaky -- AD 7B 30 D9 DD FF 3E 4C - --------------------------------- -- ----------------------- - The loneliness of the long distance runner .....
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