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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...