Bug 3195

Summary: /sbin/init goes bananas in memory full
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: pere
Component: SysVinitAssignee: David Lawrence <dkl>
Status: CLOSED DEFERRED QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 5.2   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 1999-06-02 09:48:16 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description pere 1999-06-01 15:18:40 UTC 
On two of our Redhat 5.2 machines, we has experienced a
crasy /sbin/init.

We discovered that the machines had lots of zombi processes.
'ps axl' on other machiens tells me that init normally
rests in 'do_select'.  On the problematic machines, it
rested in 'pause', and did not respond to any signals.

The zombi processes was a result of init not collecting
its childs.

I beleave this has happended when the machines in question
went out of free memory - a runaway netscape.  rwhod,
syslogd and crond was also dead.

init should not go crasy in any case, so the problem should
be fixed.
Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 1999-06-02 09:48:59 UTC 
There are many, many problems, not just with /sbin/init, that
occur when there is insufficient swap space to run linux.