Recently when I logged in to my Tomato-powered Linksys WRT54GL via SSH I was quite disturbed when top showed quite a lot of zombie processes like this (I excluded the other normal processes):
19082 root 0 Z [cp]19084 root 0 Z [cp]19087 root 0 Z [cp]19090 root 0 Z [cp]19092 root 0 Z [cp]19100 root 0 Z [cp]19103 root 0 Z [cp]19105 root 0 Z [cp]19107 root 0 Z [cp]25903 root 0 Z [cp]26035 root 0 Z [cp]
I wonder where they come from. A little bit of guessing by the process ID and comparing these with the numbers from the log from other processes allowed me to narrow down the time when they „spawned“. This is based on the assumption that Linux assigns process IDs ascendingly (until it hits the max number then it should start at the bottom again). The log shows no other irregularities, though connection logging for example is disabled.
The brackets around cp probably mean that these were kernel services, though this is just a guess. Other than that the router is behaving like normal. When searching the internet I also found out that it's not possible to get rid of zombies in any way other than a reboot. Guess they will stay there for a while, however I will closely monitor the situation.
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