[NTLUG:Discuss] strange init/zombie problem

[Seth Daniel]

All,

A strange problem popped up over the weekend.  I was playing
around with some different kernel configurations so I rebooted
a few times.  Once everything was ok I brought up X and went
about doing whatever it is that I normally do.  

Anyway, about two hours later some very strange things were
happening on the system.  A check of the process table (ps ax)
showed that almost everything that I had run since rebooting
the machine was a zombie!  Further investigation showed that the
init process (process 1) was not running.  Or better, there was
a process 1, but it had no name (there was a blank in the process
listing were the name should have been).  I assume the reason
for all the zombies was because init was not reaping processes
like it should.  Anyway, I rebooted and now everything seems
normal.  However, I'd really like to know a) how this could have
happened, and b) how I can prevent it (or if I can prevent it).  

It doesn't appear that init crashed.  There was no core dump 
anyway.  I assume that if it had crashed there wouldn't have
been a process 1 in the table anyway.

One other thing.  All of a sudden XMMS can't stay up for more
than 1 or 2 hours.  I generally have to kill it because it's
eating up half my memory.  This happens whether I use it or
not (it's ``running'' but I haven't played any music with it).  
This didn't happen until all of this other stuff started 
happening.  

I'm currently running kernel 2.2.9.   I attempted to use 
2.2.13 over the weekend, but I had strange problems while
using it too.  I thought that going back to my old kernel
would solve the problems, but it did not.
-- 
seth daniel  |  Texas Instruments DMOS4/5
seth at ti.com  |   Automation Engineering