The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own

Re:The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own by tremon on Saturday June 11, 2022 @02:27PM (#31706834)

This isn't new, right? Firmware loaders and hardware hotplug events (when not using sysfs' netlink firehose) are also spawned directly from the kernel, IIRC?

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Re:The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own by dezgeg on Saturday June 11, 2022 @06:50PM (#31709249)

In those cases you mentioned the kernel has spawned a process loaded from normal ELF executable from filesystem, just like you could do with exec(). But in this bpfilter_umh case the executable is not coming from the filesystem but instead is embedded in the kernel itself. That seems to be quite new invention.

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Re:The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own by sounds on Saturday June 11, 2022 @07:27PM (#31709480)

The interest is warranted, but it was been true for a long time that the kernel spawns processes where the executable is in the kernel itself.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-kswapd0-in-Linux-Kernel

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9154042/where-can-i-find...

Here's some official documentation on it:

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO-8.h...

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Re:The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own by throwawaylinux on Saturday June 11, 2022 @09:11PM (#31710261)

Those are kernel threads and not considered to be like spawning a process.

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