You know, the more I look at the implementation of exit()/rexit()/wait(), the more I think the PID 1's job of reaping zombies is unnecessary. In exit(), instead

You know, the more I look at the implementation of exit()/rexit()/wait(), the more I think the PID 1's job of reaping zombies is unnecessary. In exit(), instead of reparenting children to PID 1, the process could reparent them to e.g. PID 0 or PID -1, and then instead of swapping its accounting data to disk unconditionally, it could do it only if its parent's own PID is not 0 (or -1) but when it is, it would intstead do the process entry cleanup part that's in wait() on itself. This, I believe, is all that's needed to make to unparented zombie processes self-reaping. Edit: no, it's not. During the reparenting step, the process should also clean all its zombie children and that may be a long action that involves swapping from disk; so its instead delegated to PID 1 to do it one process at a time. Well, at least now I have at least some of justification for the original design.