On 05/05/2015 11:22, Didier Kryn wrote:
> I'm not sure what happens if init crashes after other processes have
> been started, wether the kernel panics or other processes continue
> without init - not a very good situation.

The Linux kernel panics when init dies. It's the dreaded "attempted
to kill init!" error message, the same you get at boot time when the
kernel fails to execute init for some reason (often a rootfs not
found).
This behaviour is debatable - a cleaner solution would probably be
to reboot when init dies. But it's how it has always worked.

Other OSes may exhibit different behaviours. On an old version of
Solaris, for instance, pid 1 could die like any other process and the
kernel would simply keep running. However, no process would reap
orphans, and zombies would accumulate, eventually making the machine
unusable - full process table with no way to clean up - so it was not
an acceptable design, and I think they changed it later on (but I
stopped using Solaris so I'm not sure how it evolved).


> Hope this helps and there are no errors :-)

AFAIK, it was pretty spot-on :)

--
Laurent