I spent a little more time with this and only waiting until the killed thread are zombies (and not reaped as we do today) really looks like the right fix. Oleg the following two patches work on top of your PTRACE_EVENT_EXIT change and probably need a little more cleanup until they are ready for serious posting. That said I want to I want to post the code so I have a change at some feedback before I prepare the final round of patches. These patches only handle the case when sighand_struct is not shared between different multi-threaded processes. The general case is solvable but that is a quite a bit more code. Eric W. Biederman (2): sighand: Count each thread group once in sighand_struct exec: If possible don't wait for ptraced threads to be reaped fs/exec.c | 15 ++++++++++----- include/linux/sched/signal.h | 2 +- kernel/exit.c | 15 ++++++++++----- kernel/fork.c | 6 ++++-- kernel/signal.c | 8 ++++++-- 5 files changed, 31 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-) Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html