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Full Discussion: Zombie process
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Zombie process Post 20365 by orca on Thursday 25th of April 2002 07:29:26 AM
Old 04-25-2002
zombie

i found a better explianation from http://www.erlenstar.demon.co.uk/unix/faq_2.html#SEC13

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When a program forks and the child finishes before the parent, the kernel still keeps some of its information about the child in case the parent might need it -- for example, the parent may need to check the child's exit status. To be able to get this information, the parent calls wait(); when this happens, the kernel can discard the information.

In the interval between the child terminating and the parent calling wait(), the child is said to be a `zombie'. (If you do `ps', the child will have a `Z' in its status field to indicate this.) Even though it's not running, it's still taking up an entry in the process table. (It consumes no other resources, but some utilities may show bogus figures for e.g. CPU usage; this is because some parts of the process table entry have been overlaid by accounting info to save space.)
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regs
 

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TAPSET::KPROCESS(3stap) 												   TAPSET::KPROCESS(3stap)

NAME
tapset::kprocess - systemtap kernel process probe points DESCRIPTION
This family of probe points is used to probe the kernel's process activities. It contains the following probe points: kprocess.create Fires whenever a new process is successfully created, either as a result of one of the fork syscall variants, or a new kernel thread. Arguments: task a handle to the newly created process new_pid pid of the newly created process kprocess.start Fires immediately before a new process begins execution. Arguments: N/A kprocess.exec Fires whenever a process attempts to exec to a new program Arguments: filename the path to the new executable kprocess.exec_complete Fires at the completion of an exec call Arguments: errno the error number resulting from the exec success a boolean indicating whether the exec was successful kprocess.exit Fires when a process terminates. This will always be followed by a kprocess.release, though the latter may be delayed if the process waits in a zombie state. Arguments: code the exit code of the process kprocess.release Fires when a process is released from the kernel. This always follows a kprocess.exit, though it may be delayed somewhat if the process waits in a zombie state. Arguments: task a task handle to the process being released pid pid of the process being released SEE ALSO
stap(1), stapprobes(3stap) Intel, IBM TAPSET::KPROCESS(3stap)
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