Processes go zombie (<defunct>) forever on 9X, not on NT4...

[Ken Coleman]

First a little background.  I'm trying to get Apache
1.3.12 working under Cygwin, particularly some of the
modules so they work in the UNIX (ie - non-broken)
manner.  I've been messing around with CGI scripts
(Perl and sh) somewhat, and there is a problem with
the subprocesses going <defunct> under Win9X (Win98SE
is what I've tested under).  I've also seen the
problem with subprocesses under Cygwin XEmacs, but
it's less reproducible there.  It happens 100% of the
time under Apache in my test cases.

I've debugged the problem a little bit, and gained the
tiniest bit of understanding of how signals and
processes work under Cygwin.  It appears to me that
*all* subprocesses actually go <defunct> temporarily
as they die, and that there is some code in place that
looks any stopped zombies that are really done and
cleans them up.  Somehow, that code is not triggering
in these cases under Win9X.  They just go zombie and
stay there forever.  This causes the unfortunate
result that the parent is never notified of the
child's finish, and the web serving process hangs
there forever.

I've attached two bz2-d strace outputs, one from
Apache running under Win9x, and the other from it
running under WinNT.  I hope it's helpful.  I know you
hate fixing 9X bugs, but I'd really appreciate a fix -
the system where I really want to run the web server
is a home system and is simply not going to get NT on
it any time soon.  I have done as much as I can
without a *much* greater understanding of some of the
internals of Cygwin - something I'm not opposed to
getting, but something that I don't have yet.

Thanks in advance for any help!
- Ken.
ken_coleman@iname.com

P.S.  Sorry for sending 40K of attachments to the
list.  I couldn't get them to be any smaller, and it's
not like I'm the first (or the last) person to do it. 
I just don't have anywhere like a website to put them.
 Maybe once I get Apache working...  :)


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apache_strace_9X.bz2
apache_strace_NT.bz2
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