On Sat, Mar 21, 2026 at 09:04:13PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > > I've seen indications in other bug tracking systems that volumeicon might > set SIGCHLD to be ignored. That would be consistent with this symptom: if > SIGCHLD is explicitly ignored (set to SIG_IGN), then the child process will > disappear immediately instead of briefly becoming a zombie process, > therefore it isn't available to be reaped by the parent, and wait4 and > similar functions will fail with ECHILD, making exit status unavailable.
Thanks for the explanation, tricky stuff! > I couldn't find evidence of volumeicon ignoring this signal in codesearch, > but perhaps some library that it uses that ignores this signal, rather than > volumeicon itself? volumeicon itself does it: https://github.com/mati75/volumeicon-debian/blob/master/src/volumeicon.c#L1330 Presumably because it can spawn an external mixer, the default is "xterm -e 'alsamixer'". Thanks, Johannes
