Message-ID: <4B43602F.1050202@nortel.com>
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:52:15 -0600
From: "Chris Friesen" <cfriesen@nortel.com>
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To: Nobin Mathew <nobin.mathew@gmail.com>
CC: Shivdas Gujare <shivdas.tech@gmail.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: init_task belongs to "process 0" or "process 1"?
References: <cf70f0211001040007s5be9f1aas7bb52928c8d50e7c@mail.gmail.com> <8d6898731001042332m6b5b97b0n5515ae166f62aad2@mail.gmail.com>
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On 01/05/2010 01:32 AM, Nobin Mathew wrote:
> init_task is the head of doubly linked list which holds all
> task_structs in the system. init_task is again the task_struct for
> process 0/swapper/idle task. This process is created manually (I meant
> to say not by copy_process() calls). Manually means they are static
> structures defined in the code (see INIT_TASK, init_mm, init_fs etc).
> There will be multiple idle task if there is more than 1 cpu core.
> Idle task is the one which is scheduled if there is no other task
> ready for scheduling.
> 
> Init task is process 1 which is initially a kernel thread created from
> process 0 using copy_process(), then it does an execv() (/sbin/init )
> or similar one to create the normal process init.
> 
> Name given to process 0 is swapper.
> .comm           = "swapper"

Oddly enough, this name makes no sense anymore.  Why don't we call
process 0 "idle"?

Chris
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