> On Sat, Mar 03, 2001 at 08:52:36AM -0500, Cory Snavely wrote: > > Right now on a big Solaris machine of mine I have about a dozen zombied > > Perls--parent process (Apache) long gone, and when I -9ed them, their PPIDs > > became 1 (init). Classic zombie. > > Hrrrm? Not quite. Init eventually inherits zombie children (when the > parent dies), but init reaps the dead children. Perhaps your children > aren't dead?
Brian, you're right. Now that I look more closely, they're in "sleep" state. If I just knew why... > > Problem is, these Perls are running scripts off a software RAID, and thus > > have it locked. This happened before--when I reboot the server to get rid of > > the zombies, or some other reason, the filesystem won't unmount, won't get a > > clean flag, and therefore will force fsck on reboot. As it's over 100GB, a > > full fsck takes several hours. > > > > Now maybe there's something I don't know to recover from this cleanly, or > > maybe Linux handles it a different way, but it seems like this is an example > > of zombies causing a real problem. If anyone knows a way around it, I'd be > > real grateful! > > Doesn't sound like a zombie to me. A zombie has -no- open files and goes > away as soon as init inherits it. A zombie is in state 'Z' on ps. > > What you describe sounds more like something in state 'D', which is > waiting for IO to complete. (This can happen on NFS when things break in > just the wrong way for some reason.) They're not zombies because they're > not dead yet (they need to release their files before they are really > dead). > > For processes stuck in a 'D' state, there is very little you can do about > them. You may be able to sneak out of re-fscking by remounting the drive > read-only before rebooting, though. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Thanks.
