zombie processes waiting for a lock, smth to worry about?

[Matthew Dillon]

:hi folks,
:
:sometimes sysctl or fstat just stop and end up as a zombie process
:
:% ps
:  PID  TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
:   81 #C1  SL     0:00.04 _su -m (csh)
:40884 #C1  IWL    0:00.00 sysctl
:41510 #C1  DWL    0:00.00 sh -c /usr/bin/fstat > /dev/null 2>&1
:41513 #C1  ZL     0:00.00 /usr/bin/fstat
:53544 #C1  IWL    0:00.00 sysctl
:53549 #C1  IWL    0:00.00 sysctl
:53647 #C1  DL     0:00.01 sh -c /usr/bin/fstat > /dev/null 2>&1
:53648 #C1  ZL     0:00.00 /usr/bin/fstat
:53651 #C1  DL     0:00.02 sh -c /usr/bin/fstat > /dev/null 2>&1
:53654 #C1  ZL     0:00.00 /usr/bin/fstat
:57387 #C1  R1L+   0:00.01 ps
:
:I can't kill them, even with kill -9
:
:so my question is, ignore them or is smth broken?

    Well, fstat can seg-fault trying to access kernel memory.  The
    question is why aren't these zombies being reaped by their parent.

    If you generate a kernel core dump with the system in this state
    and upload it to leaf I'll try to track it down.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>