Os processos sempre têm um processo pai. No entanto, o processo que se torna o novo pai quando um processo existente morre não é necessariamente PID 1. Veja como o Linux faz isso :
/*
* When we die, we re-parent all our children, and try to:
* 1. give them to another thread in our thread group, if such a member exists
* 2. give it to the first ancestor process which prctl'd itself as a
* child_subreaper for its children (like a service manager)
* 3. give it to the init process (PID 1) in our pid namespace
*/
static struct task_struct *find_new_reaper(struct task_struct *father,
struct task_struct *child_reaper)
{
struct task_struct *thread, *reaper;
thread = find_alive_thread(father);
if (thread)
return thread;
if (father->signal->has_child_subreaper) {
unsigned int ns_level = task_pid(father)->level;
/*
* Find the first ->is_child_subreaper ancestor in our pid_ns.
* We can't check reaper != child_reaper to ensure we do not
* cross the namespaces, the exiting parent could be injected
* by setns() + fork().
* We check pid->level, this is slightly more efficient than
* task_active_pid_ns(reaper) != task_active_pid_ns(father).
*/
for (reaper = father->real_parent;
task_pid(reaper)->level == ns_level;
reaper = reaper->real_parent) {
if (reaper == &init_task)
break;
if (!reaper->signal->is_child_subreaper)
continue;
thread = find_alive_thread(reaper);
if (thread)
return thread;
}
}
return child_reaper;
}