Chris Wedgwood <chris@cyphercom.com> writes:
>
> Something odd just happened. I typed 'pstree -up' and was given what looked
> like a 'recursive tree'.
>
> Anyhow, I checked and for some reason, process 1 (init) thinks its ppid is 1
> (itself). I've never seen this before.
>
> This occurred under Linux 2.0.29. I have another 2.0.29 box which doesn't do
> this. (ie. the ppid for process 1 is 0).
>
> Any ideas?
I had exactly the same thing (init suddenly has ppid 1) some weeks ago,
on one of our servers running 2.0.27 or 2.0.28 (i don't remember exactly).
I filed it under "mysterious hardware problems etc.", because it did never
happen before or after that. The system didn't get unstable, but i got a
lot of mail from a cron-job that used pstree (endless recursion), so i had
to start it again.
Now it seems more like a bug that's triggered very seldom?