topic Re: strange process in Operating System - HP-UX

strange process

Cheung_2 — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 07:27:06 GMT

The below is the result of the ???top??? command , what is this process, can i kill it? Thx.

root 2 1 0 Nov13 ? 00:00:00 [keventd ]

Re: strange process

Clemens van Everdingen — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 08:43:18 GMT

Hi,

No I would not just kill the process.
I think your box need a reboot to fix this.

But before rebooting try troubleshooting this issue first.

As far as I can tell this is a linux box we are talking about, so check your /var/log/messages to see if something strange is in there.

Search google as well for keventd and defunct !

C.

Re: strange process

T G Manikandan — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:22:54 GMT

defunct process or zombie process is the process where the parent process died without waiting for the child.

Also this could be like the child process gets completed and sends a signal to the parent process and the parent process is yet to act on the child process.

This defunct processes just occupy the process table.There is no adverse effects if they are present.

The ways it can be cleaned is like,

It can be cleaned like

1.Bringing down the entire application which will bring down all the processes associated to it thus cleaning them.

Here it is a different scenario where the parent process is the system process you cannot kill it or do anything.

2.Reboot the system.

As they do not provide any adverse effects you can take it off when you are planned for a system reboot during some maintenance work.

Re: strange process

Clemens van Everdingen — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:25:58 GMT

TG,

Since this is connected to parent pid 1, I wonder whether the system is running at all ?

C.

Re: strange process

T G Manikandan — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:37:41 GMT

Clemens is right.

Also,the keventd is a system process.
I think your system is in a wierd state.

Is anything working fine on the system?

Re: strange process

Shannon Petry — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 17:32:20 GMT

normally processes who's parents die will attach to PID 1. This is init, and init will inherit all zombies all the time.

Now, what is strange is that keventd is the kernel logger for events. Meaning, I/O, device status, memory errors, etc... I would reboot the system. If this problem persists you need to rebuild your kernel.

keventd is a linux kernel process, and does not exist in HP-UX.

Regards,
Shannon

Re: strange process

U.SivaKumar_2 — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 07:47:40 GMT

Hi,

keventd is not a kernel logger. It is a Process context handler thread in linux used by Interrupt handlers for handling sudden events which requires process context switching.
Eg:- Device hotplugging

regards,
U.SivaKumar

Re: strange process

U.SivaKumar_2 — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 11:53:59 GMT

There is no parent children concept with keventd kernel thread and init program. But kernel threads initialisation is done by init program.

Analysing init program source code. main.c

kernel_thread(init, NULL, CLONE_FS | CLONE_FILES | CLONE_SIGNAL);

check the glibc version if old upgrade otherwise a reboot will solve the problem.

regards,
U.SivaKumar