[vbox-dev] SVN builds Leaving zombie processes on shutdown of guest

[Perry Halbert]

Good day Klaus,

Strange indeed.  As I said I didn't notice this before but can't promise 
exactly when It started.  I don't usually need to trace why excessive 
idle CPU ticks are present.  I did check the released (4.2.12) and it 
does not produce this behavior.

I do have backups of my builds and can if needed to see where it 
started. (at least to the middle of March)

Question if I may,  what is the purpose of the %U in the startup command 
(VirtualBox %U)


Perry


On 06/04/2013 04:06 AM, Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> Hi Perry,
>
> On 03.06.2013 23:10, Perry Halbert wrote:
>> More research on this shows that using VBoxHeadless -s <guest> or shift
>> start from the main manager does not produce the zombies.
>>
>> Only normal starting from the main manager or shortcut does.
> Very very strange, I'm not aware of any intentional code changes in this
> area for approx. a year, and actually I have no idea why VBoxHeadless
> processes would consistently behave differently. The distinction should
> be "VM started through the API" (i.e. anything in the GUI, and
> VBoxManage startvm) or "VM started directly" (i.e.
> VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless/VBoxSDL --startvm foo). In the latter case
> VBoxSVC is not the parent and thus isn't responsible for waiting for the
> process exit result.
>
> I can reproduce, so will investigate what's causing this behavior change.
>
> Thanks for letting us know...
>
> Klaus
>
>> On 06/01/2013 11:56 AM, Perry Halbert wrote:
>>> Strange behavior the last few weeks.
>>>
>>> Stopping ( even saved state ) a guest leaves a zombie process on the
>>> host.
>>> Each new start and it uses a new pid and the zombie is still there.
>>> Stop all guests and the main manager and all processes including the
>>> zombie processes finally clear.
>>>
>>> Host = Ubuntu 12.04 LTS guest = any.
>>>
>>> USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
>>> perry     9538  6.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    11:36   0:34
>>> [VirtualBox] <defunct>
>>> perry     9934  4.3  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    11:37   0:22
>>> [VirtualBox] <defunct>
>>>
>>> Normally I would not have seen this but the processor was doing work
>>> when it should have been idle. I have never seen a zombie process
>>> using CPU ticks before.  Wait long enough and the %CPU will finally
>>> get to zero but it seems to take like 20 to 30 minutes to do so.
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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