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What do you do once all processes/tasks have been killed?

In my microkernel you need at least one process running to spawn another, so a process-less environment is really pointless. So requesting all processes to be terminated, and waiting for them to die (or kill them directly if you have the privileges) is the only way to do a software shutdown.

I guess in some macrokernels it may be possible to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and launch the task manager or something.

It's also not really an issue in a modular system, or a system with a strong parent/child organization.

In a modular system, generally you can't kill the executive modules -- they are built to restart on exit, usually. And one of those modules would restart your shell, when it saw that you didn't have one.

On a typical parent/child system, the login process starts your shell, and then waits around for months for a "child exit" signal. When it gets that signal, it asks for a new login and starts a new shell.

MessiahAndrw wrote:What do you do once all processes/tasks have been killed?

That's not possible for me. The kernel process always exists.


JAL