Bug #2349

fork() after signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN) produces zombies

Added by matthiasr about 1 year ago. Updated 10 months ago.

Status:Closed Start date:04/17/2012
Priority:Normal Due date:
Assignee:- % Done:

100%
Category:-
Target version:-

Description

The code in the attached zombifier.c makes every exiting child into a zombie on master[1]. This doesn't happen on any non-DragonFly system I could test it on, and from what I gather from this discussion[2] and what Wikipedia says about SUSv3/POSIX-1.2001 the correct behaviour is not to keep them around if the SIGCHLD handler is explicitly set to SIG_IGN.

This has realworldly bitten me because the FCGI-to-CGI-wrapper I use[4] relies on this behaviour and I couldn't SSH into my server as a non-root user due to PID exhaustion.

[1] DragonFly zz.2pktfkt.net 3.1-DEVELOPMENT DragonFly v3.1.0.545.g4c42b-DEVELOPMENT #6: Tue Apr 17 21:24:31 CEST 2012 matthias@zz.2pktfkt.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/X86_64_GENERIC x86_64
[2] http://markmail.org/message/3s4jj7dpgw34yvmh
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process
[4] http://pkgsrc.se/wip/fcgiwrap

zombifier.c - test case – run and check "ps axl | fgrep zombifier" (401 Bytes) matthiasr, 04/17/2012 01:11 pm

dragonfly-SIGCHLD.patch - proposed patch (2.8 kB) matthiasr, 04/17/2012 02:42 pm

Related todos

Related issues

related to Bug #2336: 3.0.3 catchall Resolved 03/26/2012

History

#1
Updated by herrgard about 1 year ago

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 01:11:09PM -0700, Matthias Rampke via Redmine wrote:
> The code in the attached zombifier.c makes every exiting child into a zombie on master[1]. This doesn't happen on any non-DragonFly system I could test it on, and from what I gather from this discussion[2] and what Wikipedia says about SUSv3/POSIX-1.2001 the correct behaviour is not to keep them around if the SIGCHLD handler is explicitly set to SIG_IGN.
>
> This has realworldly bitten me because the FCGI-to-CGI-wrapper I use[4] relies on this behaviour and I couldn't SSH into my server as a non-root user due to PID exhaustion.

Hm, maybe this could be the same reason why I keep getting zombies with firefox, thunderbird and xpdf all the time.

Max

#2
Updated by matthiasr about 1 year ago

Here's a patch against master I cargoculted from FreeBSD-current, taking the patches in that old thread as pointers. The kernel boots and works for me and the test case no longer generates zombie processes.

#3
Updated by ftigeot about 1 year ago

  • Status changed from New to Resolved
  • % Done changed from 50 to 100

Patch committed, thanks!

#4
Updated by tuxillo 10 months ago

  • Status changed from Resolved to Closed

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