What is the difference between SIGTERM and SIGKILL when it comes to the process tree?
When a root thread receives SIGKILL does it get killed cleanly or does it leave it's child threads as zombies?
Is there any signal which can be sent to a root thread to cleanly exit by not leaving any zombie threads ?
Thanks.
If you kill the root process (parent process), this should make orphan children, not zombie children. orphan children are made when you kill a process's parent, and the kernel makes init the parent of orphans. init is supposed to wait until orphan dies, then use wait to clean it up.
Zombie children are created when a process (not its parent) ends and its parent does not take up its exit status from the process table.
It sounds to me like you are worried about leaving orphans because by definition, when you kill a zombies parent process, the zombie child itself dies.
To kill your orphans, use kill -9 , which is the equivalent SIGKILL.
Here is a more in depth tutorial for killing stuff on linux:
http://riccomini.name/posts/linux/2012-09-25-kill-subprocesses-linux-bash/
You can't control that by signal; only its parent process can control that, by calling waitpid() or setting signal handlers for SIGCHLD. See SIGCHLD and SA_NOCLDWAIT in the sigaction(2) manpage for details.
Also, what happens to child threads depends on the Linux kernel version. With 2.6's POSIX threads, killing the main thread should cause the other threads to exit cleanly. With 2.4 LinuxThreads, each thread is actually a separate process and SIGKILL doesn't give the root thread a chance to tell the others to shut down, whereas SIGTERM does.
Related
I read that PID reuse is done when process is zombie and was waited for.
What happens if I forked hundreds of processes and just killed the parent without waiting for them? I know they will be children of init process but who will call wait on them? (else we are in trouble and limited with PIDs).
I know they will be children of init process but who will call wait on them?
init (process with PID 1) will reap all of its child processes, including adpoted zombie processes. As it says on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process
init periodically executes the wait system call to reap any zombies
with init as parent.
Hello I am new to learning about system calls. I am currently learning about fork() and wait() system calls. I know that fork() creates a new child process. What confuses me is the wait() call.
This is what I understand so far:
(1) When a process dies, it goes into a 'Zombie State' i.e. it does not release its PID but waits for its parent to acknowledge that the child process has died and then the PID is released
(2) So we need a way to figure out when the child process has ended so that we don't leave any processes in the zombie state
I am confused with the following things:
(1) When running a C program where I fork a new child process, if I don't call wait() explicitly, is it done internally when the child process ends? Because you could still write a block of code in C where you run fork() without wait() and it seems to work fine?
(2) What does wait() do? I know it returns the PID of the child process that was terminated, but how is this helpful/related to releasing the PID of the terminated process?
I am sorry for such naive questions but this is something I was really curious about and I couldn't find any good resources online! Your help is much appreciated!
wait isn't about preventing zombie states. Zombie states are your friend.
POSIX more or less lets you do two things with pids: signal them with kill or reap them (and synchronize with them) with wait/waitpid/waittid.
The wait syscalls are primarily for waiting on a process to exit or die from a signal (though they can also be used to wait on other process status changes such as the child becoming stopped or the child waking up from being stopped).
Secondarily, they're about reaping exit/died statuses, thereby releasing (zombified) pids.
Until you release a pid with wait/waitpid/waittid, you can continue flogging the pid with requests for it to die (kill(pid,SIGTERM);) or with some other signal (other then SIGKILL) and you can rest assured the pid represents the process you've forked off and that you're not accidentally killing someone else's process.
But once you reap a zombified pid by waiting on it, then the pid is no longer yours and another process might take it (which typically happens after some time, as pids in the system typically increment and then wrap arround).
That's why auto-wait would be a bad idea (in some cases it isn't and then you can achieve it with globally with signal(SIGCHLD,SIG_IGN);) and why (short-lived) zombies states are your friend. They keep the child pid stable for you until you're ready to release it.
If you exit without releasing any of your children's pids, then you don't have to worry about zombie children anymore--your child processes will be reparented to the init process, which will wait on them for you when they die.
When you call fork(), a new process is created with you being its parent. When the child process finishes its running with a call to exit(), its process descriptor is still kept in the kernel's memory. It is your responsibility as its parent to collect its exit code, which is done with a call to wait() syscall. wait() blocks the parent process until one of its childrens is finished.
Zombie process is the name given to a process whose exit code was never collected by its parent.
Regarding to your first question - wait() is not called automatically as zombie processes wouldn't exist if it did. It is your responsibility as a programmer. Omitting the call to wait() will still work as you mentioned - but it is considered a bad practice.
Both this link and this link explains it good.
I have a process on Linux that starts up 20 child processes via fork. When I kill the parent process, it will often kill all of the child processes, but sometimes it doesn't kill all of them, and I'm left with some orphaned processes. This isn't a race condition on startup, this is after the processes have been active for several minutes.
What sort of things could cause SIGTERM to not propagate to some child processes properly?
There is no automatic propagation of signals (SIGTERM or otherwise) to children in the process tree.
Inasmuch as killing a parent process can be observed to cause some children to exit, this is due to ancillary effects -- such as SIGPIPEs being caused when the child attempts to read or write to a pipeline with the dead parent on the other side.
If you want to ensure that children are cleaned up when your process receives a SIGTERM, install a signal handler and do it yourself.
If you use process group id (pgid) when sending a signal, the signal would be propagated to parent process and all its children.
To know pgid, use ps a -o pgid,command.
We have a main node process that spawns a number of child processes with child_process.fork(), which themselves each spawn a helper child process. We are using node-forever to manage the lifetime of the main node processes, and often use forever restartall to restart this.
One problem we are seeing occasionally is that the grandchild processes will fail to terminate, and we end up with duplicated child processes running. Ie. what should be this:
Main Process
Child Process 1
Grandchild Process 1
Child Process 2
Grandchild Process 2
Ends up like this after restartall:
Main Process
Child Process 1
Grandchild Process 1
Child Process 2
Grandchild Process 2
Grandchild Process 1
Grandchild Process 2
Unsurprisingly this causes lots of weird problems and we usually have to restart the whole server (or kill processes manually, if we can establish which are the old ones).
As I understand it, forever issues a SIGTERM message to the process when it does a restartall. I believe this message should cascade down to the child and grandchild processes (but please correct me if I've made a false assumption there). Since this problem only occurs maybe once in 100, perhaps it's something related to timing?
What circumstances could cause the grandchild processes to fail to terminate? How to mitigate this?
OS is Debian Squeeze.
EDIT: My initial description was a bit over simplified. I've updated it to include all the details.
EDIT2 : We don't use forever anymore. I recommend PM2
How do zombie threads get formed in C/C++, and what do you need to make sure to do in order to prevent them from being created? I know they're just normal threads that didn't terminate properly, but I'm a little hazy on the specifics.
A zombie thread is a joinable thread which has terminated, but which
hasn't been joined. Normally, either a thread should be joined at some
time, or it should be detached. Otherwise, the OS maintains its state
for some possible future join, which takes resources.
Do you mean pthreads or zombie processes? A zombie process (not thread) gets created when a parent doesn't reap its child. It's because the OS keeps the return state of the process if the parent needs it later. If the parent dies, the child is given to the init thread which just sits and calls "wait" over and over again (reaping any children that die). So a zombie process can only be created when the parent is still alive and the child has terminated.
The same applies for pthreads. If you detach the thread, it will not keep that process termination state around after it finishes (similar to processes).