I once spent several angry hours researching zombie processes in a quest to kill them by any means necessary. Ended up rebooting, which was a sort of baby-with-the bath-water solution.
Zombie processes still infuriate me. While I’m not a Rust developer, nor do I particularly care about the language, I’m eagerly watching Redox OS, as it looks like the micro kernel OS with the best chance to make to it useful desktop status. A good micro kernel would address so so many of the worst aspects of Linux.
Zombie processes are already dead. They aren’t executing, the kernel is just keeping a reference to them so their parent process can check their return code (waitpid).
All processes becomes zombies briefly after they exit, just usually their parents wait on them correctly. If their parents exit without waiting on the child, then the child gets reparented to init, which will wait on it. If the parent stays alive, but doesn’t wait on the child, then it will remain zombied until the parent exits and triggers the reparenting.
Its not really Linux’s fault if processes don’t clean up their children correctly, and I’m 99% sure you can zombie a child on redox given its a POSIX OS.
I haven’t tried this, but if you just need the parent to call waitpid on the child’s pid then you should be able to do that by attaching to the process via gdb, breaking, and then manually invoking waitpid and continuing.
Zombie processes are hilarious. They are the unkillable package delivery person of the Linux system. They have some data that must be delivered before they can die. Before they are allowed to die.
Sometimes just listening to them is all they want. (Strace or redirect their output anywhere.)
Sometimes, the whole village has to burn. (Reboot)
Ok, how change of kernel would fix userspace program not reading return value? And if you just want to use microkernel, then use either HURD or whatever DragonflyBSD uses.
But generally microkernels are not solution to problems most people claim they would solve, especially in post-meltdown era.
This particular issue could be solved in most cases in a monolithic kernel. That it isn’t, is by design. But it’s a terrible design decision, because it can lead to situations where (for example) a zombie process locks a mount point and prevents unmounting because the kernel insists it’s still in use by the zombie process. Which the kernel provides no mechanism for terminating.
It is provable via experiment in Linux by use of fuse filesystems. Create a program that is guaranteed to become a zombie. Run it within a filesystem mounted by an in-kernel module, like a remote nfs mount. You now have a permanently mounted NFS mount point. Now, use mount something using fuse, say a WebDAV remote point. Run the same zombie process there. Again, the mount point is unmountable. Now, kill the fuse process itself. The mount point will be unmounted and disappear.
This is exactly how microkernels work. Every module is killable, crashable, upgradable - all without forcing a reboot or affecting any processes not using the module. And in a well-designed microkernel, even processes using the module can in many cases continue functioning as if the restarted kernel module never changed.
Fuse is really close to the capabilities of microkernels, except it’s only filesystems. In a microkernel, nearly everything is like fuse. A linux kernel compiled such that everything is a loadable module, and not hard linked into the kernel, is close to a microkernel, except without the benefits of actually being a microkernel.
Microkernels are better. Popularity does not prove superiority, except in the metric of popularity.
Can you elaborate? I am not an OS design expert, and I thought microkernels had some advantages.
Many people think that microcernels are only way to run one program on multiple machines without modyfing them. Counterexample to such statement is Plan 9, which had such capability with monolithic kernel.
That’s not something I ever associated with microkernels to be honest. That’s just clustering.
I was more interested in having minimal kernels with a bunch of processes handling low level stuff like file systems that could be restarted if they died. The other cool thing was virtualized kernels.
nah, you can have micro-kernel features on linux, but you can’t have monolithc kernel features on microkernel, there’s zero arguments in favor of a micro kernel, except being a novel project
Do explain how you can have micro kernel features on Linux. Explain, please, how I can kill the filesystem module and restart it when it bugs out, and how I can prevent hard kernel crashes when a bug in a kernel module causes a lock-up. I’m really interested in hearing how I can upgrade a kernel module with a patch without forcing a reboot; that’d really help on Arch, where minor, patch-level kernel updates force reboots multiple times a week (without locking me into an -lts kernel that isn’t getting security patches).
I’d love to hear how monolithic kernels have solved these.
I’ve been hoping that we can sneak more and more things into userspace on Linux. Then, one day, Linus will wake up and discover he’s accidentally made a microkernel.
I thought the point of lts kernels is they still get patches despite being old.
Other than that though you’re right on the money. I think they don’t know what the characteristics of a microkernel are. I think they mean that a microkernel can’t have all the features of a monolithic kernel, what they fail to realise is that might actually be a good thing.
I thought the point of lts kernels is they still get patches despite being old.
Well, yeah, you’re right. My shameful admission is that I’m not using LTS because I wanted to play with bcachefs and it’s not in LTS. Maybe there’s a package for LTS now that’d let me at it, but, still. It’s a bad excuse, but there you go.
I think a lot of people also don’t realize that most of the performance issues have been worked around, and if RedoxOS is paying attention to advances in the microkernel field and is not trying to solve every problem in isolation, they could end up with close to monolithic kernel performance. Certainly close to Windows performance, and that seems good enough for Industry.
I don’t think microkernels will ever compete in the HPC field, but I highly doubt anyone complaining about the performance penalty of microkernel architecture would actual notice a difference.
Windows is a hybrid kernel, and has some interesting layers of abstraction, all of which make it slower. It’s also full of junkware these days. So beating it shouldn’t be that hard.
Yeah to be fair in HPC it’s probably easier to just setup a watchdog and reboot that node in case of issues. No need for the extra resilience.
RedoxOS would likely never become feature complete enough to be a stable, useful and daily-drivable OS. It’s currently a hobbyist OS that is mainly used as a testbed for OS programming in Rust.
If the RedoxOs devs could port the Cosmic DE, they’d become one of the best Toy OS and maybe become used on some serious projects . This could give them enough funds to become a viable OS used by megacorps on infrastructures where security is critical and it may lead it to develop into a truly daily drivable OS.
Also fake because zombie processes.
I once spent several angry hours researching zombie processes in a quest to kill them by any means necessary. Ended up rebooting, which was a sort of baby-with-the bath-water solution.
Zombie processes still infuriate me. While I’m not a Rust developer, nor do I particularly care about the language, I’m eagerly watching Redox OS, as it looks like the micro kernel OS with the best chance to make to it useful desktop status. A good micro kernel would address so so many of the worst aspects of Linux.
Zombie processes are already dead. They aren’t executing, the kernel is just keeping a reference to them so their parent process can check their return code (
waitpid).All processes becomes zombies briefly after they exit, just usually their parents wait on them correctly. If their parents exit without waiting on the child, then the child gets reparented to init, which will wait on it. If the parent stays alive, but doesn’t wait on the child, then it will remain zombied until the parent exits and triggers the reparenting.
Its not really Linux’s fault if processes don’t clean up their children correctly, and I’m 99% sure you can zombie a child on redox given its a POSIX OS.
Edit: https://gist.github.com/cameroncros/8ae3def101efc08be2cd69846d9dcc81 - Rust program to generate orphans.
I haven’t tried this, but if you just need the parent to call waitpid on the child’s pid then you should be able to do that by attaching to the process via gdb, breaking, and then manually invoking waitpid and continuing.
I think that should do it. I’ll try later today and report back.
Of course, this risks getting into an even worse state, because if the parent later tries to correctly wait for its child, the call will hang.
Edit: Will clean up the orphan/defunct process.
If the parent ever tried to wait, they would either get ECHILD if there are no children, or it would block until a child exited.
Will likely cause follow on issues - reaping someone elses children is generally frowned upon :D.
Zombie processes are hilarious. They are the unkillable package delivery person of the Linux system. They have some data that must be delivered before they can die. Before they are allowed to die.
Sometimes just listening to them is all they want. (Strace or redirect their output anywhere.)
Sometimes, the whole village has to burn. (Reboot)
Ok, how change of kernel would fix userspace program not reading return value? And if you just want to use microkernel, then use either HURD or whatever DragonflyBSD uses.
But generally microkernels are not solution to problems most people claim they would solve, especially in post-meltdown era.
This particular issue could be solved in most cases in a monolithic kernel. That it isn’t, is by design. But it’s a terrible design decision, because it can lead to situations where (for example) a zombie process locks a mount point and prevents unmounting because the kernel insists it’s still in use by the zombie process. Which the kernel provides no mechanism for terminating.
It is provable via experiment in Linux by use of fuse filesystems. Create a program that is guaranteed to become a zombie. Run it within a filesystem mounted by an in-kernel module, like a remote nfs mount. You now have a permanently mounted NFS mount point. Now, use mount something using fuse, say a WebDAV remote point. Run the same zombie process there. Again, the mount point is unmountable. Now, kill the fuse process itself. The mount point will be unmounted and disappear.
This is exactly how microkernels work. Every module is killable, crashable, upgradable - all without forcing a reboot or affecting any processes not using the module. And in a well-designed microkernel, even processes using the module can in many cases continue functioning as if the restarted kernel module never changed.
Fuse is really close to the capabilities of microkernels, except it’s only filesystems. In a microkernel, nearly everything is like fuse. A linux kernel compiled such that everything is a loadable module, and not hard linked into the kernel, is close to a microkernel, except without the benefits of actually being a microkernel.
Microkernels are better. Popularity does not prove superiority, except in the metric of popularity.
Can you elaborate? I am not an OS design expert, and I thought microkernels had some advantages.
Many people think that microcernels are only way to run one program on multiple machines without modyfing them. Counterexample to such statement is Plan 9, which had such capability with monolithic kernel.
That’s not something I ever associated with microkernels to be honest. That’s just clustering.
I was more interested in having minimal kernels with a bunch of processes handling low level stuff like file systems that could be restarted if they died. The other cool thing was virtualized kernels.
nah, you can have micro-kernel features on linux, but you can’t have monolithc kernel features on microkernel, there’s zero arguments in favor of a micro kernel, except being a novel project
ORLY.
Do explain how you can have micro kernel features on Linux. Explain, please, how I can kill the filesystem module and restart it when it bugs out, and how I can prevent hard kernel crashes when a bug in a kernel module causes a lock-up. I’m really interested in hearing how I can upgrade a kernel module with a patch without forcing a reboot; that’d really help on Arch, where minor, patch-level kernel updates force reboots multiple times a week (without locking me into an -lts kernel that isn’t getting security patches).
I’d love to hear how monolithic kernels have solved these.
I’ve been hoping that we can sneak more and more things into userspace on Linux. Then, one day, Linus will wake up and discover he’s accidentally made a microkernel.
I thought the point of lts kernels is they still get patches despite being old.
Other than that though you’re right on the money. I think they don’t know what the characteristics of a microkernel are. I think they mean that a microkernel can’t have all the features of a monolithic kernel, what they fail to realise is that might actually be a good thing.
Well, yeah, you’re right. My shameful admission is that I’m not using LTS because I wanted to play with bcachefs and it’s not in LTS. Maybe there’s a package for LTS now that’d let me at it, but, still. It’s a bad excuse, but there you go.
I think a lot of people also don’t realize that most of the performance issues have been worked around, and if RedoxOS is paying attention to advances in the microkernel field and is not trying to solve every problem in isolation, they could end up with close to monolithic kernel performance. Certainly close to Windows performance, and that seems good enough for Industry.
I don’t think microkernels will ever compete in the HPC field, but I highly doubt anyone complaining about the performance penalty of microkernel architecture would actual notice a difference.
Windows is a hybrid kernel, and has some interesting layers of abstraction, all of which make it slower. It’s also full of junkware these days. So beating it shouldn’t be that hard.
Yeah to be fair in HPC it’s probably easier to just setup a watchdog and reboot that node in case of issues. No need for the extra resilience.
RedoxOS would likely never become feature complete enough to be a stable, useful and daily-drivable OS. It’s currently a hobbyist OS that is mainly used as a testbed for OS programming in Rust.
If the RedoxOs devs could port the Cosmic DE, they’d become one of the best Toy OS and maybe become used on some serious projects . This could give them enough funds to become a viable OS used by megacorps on infrastructures where security is critical and it may lead it to develop into a truly daily drivable OS.
HURD 2, the return of rust