Re: kill -9 <pid of X>

Andreas Schwab (schwab@issan.informatik.uni-dortmund.de)
14 Aug 1998 11:46:08 +0200


MOLNAR Ingo <mingo@chiara.csoma.elte.hu> writes:

|> On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Rob Hagopian wrote:
|>
|> > I missed that message along the line... For pure cleanliness, I think that
|> > 'kill -9 1' should be blocked in userspace tools. It does make much more
|> > sense there.
|>
|> the kernel assumes on some places that a process _always_ has a parent. So
|> it can always blindly dereference p->p_pptr.

I don't think this is a problem, because even if init dies (perhaps
because of an oops) it will never be reaped, since noone wait()'s for him.
Thus it will survive as a zombie, and p_pptr will remain valid.

-- 
Andreas Schwab                                      "And now for something
schwab@issan.informatik.uni-dortmund.de              completely different"
schwab@gnu.org

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