[Novalug] Linux boot, was Re: Kernel Compiles

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org
Wed Apr 14 12:08:10 EDT 2010


Parent Process ID (PPID).  Never tried a kill 0 myself, but feel free ...  ;)
I know a kill 1 will, on virtually every POSIX platform, bring down the
system (how gracefully varies ;).


When process names are in brackets ([]), it means the arguments are not known.
This is often because the kernel executes the process, instead of a command shell.

The kernel regularly forks or "wakes up" user processes to handle or monitor
various operations when thresholds are reached.  E.g., pdflush is one such
process when various virtual memory (vm) thresholds are crossed.




----- Original Message ----
From: Ed James <edward.james@gmail.com>

This is where I get confused, because on my system init has PID 1 (and PPID 0).

Question (for nobody in particular):  for a "ps -ef", why are some of
the process
names in square brackets, like: [kthread] and [khelper]?  Seems like most (not
all) were forked/spawned/execed/birthed by init.



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