Russell King wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 09:00:21AM +0100, Kasper Dupont wrote:
> >
> > Why actually panic because of an attempt to kill init?
> >
> > Of course a message should be printed, but after that
> > couldn't do_exit enter a loop where it just handles
> > signals and zombies?
> 
> Examine the LKML archive around 23rd December 2001, where Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> | pid1 ends up trying to kill pid1 and it goes deeply down the toilet from
> | that point onwards. The Unix traditional world reboots when pid 1 dies.

Thank you for pointing that out. But I'm afraid it doesn't
answer my question. I understand that a system where init
has died cannot be expected to continue working like if
nothing was wrong.

What to do in this case might be a matter of taste, of
course a panic or a reboot does make sense. But trying to
recover as much as posible would also make sense. This
could be caused by a problem in userspace, the kernel does
not have to be corrupted already.

If we agree that this is a matter of taste lets not try to
argue about whose taste is the best.

I was really just wondering if the patch below would work.
Well I just tested it, and it did work like I expected. If
I killed init (by replacing /sbin/init with something else
and telling init to reexecute itself) I got the warning.
But the system continued to work.

Of course init would no longer respawn processes, and I
could not change runlevel. But I could login, kill
processes, and remount filesystems read-only. And no
processes became zombies.

-- 
Kasper Dupont -- der bruger for meget tid på usenet.
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