Recovering from dead init

[David Gibson]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 03:32:39PM +1000, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Due to an unfortunate accident, init got killed. It seems that now I'm
> getting lots of zombies piling up (around 300 now). I was wondering if
> anyone knew a way (other than reboot) to recover from this.

I think you'll find that init isn't actually dead, although it might
be in a deeply confused state.  If init had actually died you should
have got a kernel panic.

If you could convince what's left of init to (re-) exec() the init
binary that would probably recover things.  It might be possible to do
that with ptrace(), but probably quite hairy.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson