I am working on an Android phone which has Linux Kernel 2.6.35.11. When I generated the boot chart, I can see there are 2 /init processes. One is in sleep almost all the time and the other is doing a lot of processing and was created after around 5 seconds. Also when I plugged in the phone to the PC and ran "adb shell", I saw 3 /init processes!! 2nd one's parent was the first one and the third one's parent was the second /init. All the other major threads were spawned by the third /init process!
Can anyone throw some hints on why are there multiple /init processes??

Hi All,
I found the cause for the above stated multiple /init processes problem. In Android, exec command is implemented a combination of fork()+execv(). So while running exec commands from init.rc, /init process first forks itself and then the resulting child execv()s a new binary. If this execv() fails ( which was the case with me ) and there's is no error checking, then there shall remain 2 processes with the same name ( in this case, 2 /init processes ). We added _exit() for the failed execv() case so that the failed child terminates immediately.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for posting back - I was interested in what was happening.

Welcome to LQ. I think you're already becoming a valuable contributor here.

Thanks for taking the time to post back your solution.
Thanks for taking the time to mark this "[SOLVED]".
Your "[Android]" tag in the title is a good idea, more folks should use it.

Again, welcome to LQ.