*BSD News Article 80079


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What is a zombie?
Date: 6 Oct 1996 15:11:26 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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Message-ID: <538i6u$823@uriah.heep.sax.de>
References: <52a5dt$qef@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <3249D8F7.2EA39DDA@lambert.org>
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  <5361v2$ba@uriah.heep.sax.de> <3256F5F4.7217ACEC@lambert.org>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> wrote:

> If there were some assurances (like no outstanding PR's over a
> certain age) that the code would even be looked at, I *might*
> be willing to tackle an implementation of SA_NOCLDWAIT.

There are outstanding PRs for things where nobody is working on, or
for things where nobody can reproduce the problem or even has at least
the hardware for it.  There are certainly many stale PRs, where the
problem has already been solved since as the side-effect for something
else.

In this case, i'm already intersted in persuing this, Bruce is also
watching the discussion, so the expected time for your PR to be
incorporated will be low if the fix concentrates on the fix itself
(i.e., without revamping 30 files for cosmetic changes, elimination of
goto's, etc. :)

> Of course the problem is trivially solvable by making the
> distinction between SIG_IGN and SIG_DFL instead, without
> dragging in all of the overdesigned mass which happens to
> include SA_NOCLDWAIT.

Again, you don't know what you're talking about.  You haven't even
looked into the code.  Even 20 minutes of experimenting with any of it
would have shown you that your statements are wrong.

I did look, so either believe it, or prove me wrong.

The question whether to implement SA_NOCLDWAIT, or make a distinction
between SIG_IGN and SIG_DFL is a minor implementation detail.  It's in
no way related to the actual problem itself (which i leave out as an
exercise for the reader unless somebody pops up who explains me that
he's got seriously interested in helping to implement this feature).

Actually, the SA_NOCLDWAIT implementation itself was really an easy
one...  It took some 5 minutes (3 of them for a major recompilation of
the kernel since i changed a central .h file).  The problems are
elsewhere.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)