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Ian Campbell authored
nr_processes() returns the sum of the per cpu counter process_counts for all online CPUs. This counter is incremented for the current CPU on fork() and decremented for the current CPU on exit(). Since a process does not necessarily fork and exit on the same CPU the process_count for an individual CPU can be either positive or negative and effectively has no meaning in isolation. Therefore calculating the sum of process_counts over only the online CPUs omits the processes which were started or stopped on any CPU which has since been unplugged. Only the sum of process_counts across all possible CPUs has meaning. The only caller of nr_processes() is proc_root_getattr() which calculates the number of links to /proc as stat->nlink = proc_root.nlink + nr_processes(); You don't have to be all that unlucky for the nr_processes() to return a negative value leading to a negative number of links (or rather, an apparently enormous number of links). If th...
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