Re: Bug#482346: zsh doesn't always wait for its children (-> zombie)

[Phil Pennock <zsh-workers+phil.pennock@spodhuis.org>]

On 2008-05-24 at 14:44 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Note: when I kill zsh, the zombie remains there and gets attached
> to init. The load average remains very high.

If the zombie is reparented to init but still stays a zombie, then
there's something worse wrong with your system.  If init can't reap its
children then it's understandable that zsh might have troubles too.

Since you're on a rarer architecture that doesn't see so much Linux
kernel debugging, I'd be inclined to look at what has changed in the
kernel's architecture-specific signal handling code.  (But see below).

Further, it's strange that zombies are contributing to load average; if
zsh is gone (killed off and no longer even possibly stuck in a tight
loop)  and there's the zombie and init left, then there shouldn't be
anything contributing to load avg.

If you use tools such as top(1), what processes are they attributing the
load to?  Is the high load average confirmed by vmstat reports of idle
CPU, or is the load avg really out of sync with CPU reality?  Linux is
unusual in counting processes blocked on storage IO towards the load
average, so if the problem is something like a flaky disk underneath the
root filesystem, that might be complicating your problem.

-Phil