Hello.

I was reading about killing processes in linux and found the killall to be different in Solaris than in any other distribution. As you very well know, running killall in Solaris will kill all existing processes. And I was thinking, what would be the difference between rebooting a linux machine and just killing every process (leaving it similar to a rebooted state)?

Thank you.

Just my thoughts:

Rebooting clears out the dust bunnies in memory. Killing processes does not. The processes are gone, but the dust bunnies are still there.

Also, depending on the update status, a reboot might be necessary to enable new functions, particularly new kernels.

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But if you kill a process, won't all of its used memory be cleared out along side the process itself?

"Dust bunnies," eh? Is that a technical term?

Either way, they don't exist in Linux because Linux manages memory properly, and this is precisely the reason why an Android phone can run for months/years between reboots.

The technicalities of it are explained quite well here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...kill-a-process

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Killall (as most commonly implemented in Linux) may not in fact actually kill all (or any) processes! It sends a signal (generally sigterm if not spcified, check the man page for your implementation) to all running user processes and the return value indicates success if AT LEAST ONE process actually exits. Note that many server processes and the kernel are not even considered in most implementations. Other processes process the signal as they are coded to do, which may or may not result in an exit.

A reboot flushes all queues, resets all hardware devices, and starts server processes to include the kernel to the warm-boot level. Only a cold boot gives you a more clean system state.

The difference is significant, but how significant for your purposes depends upon what your purpose IS!

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A reboot will kill zombies and nothing else will.

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if you could successfully kill all (I mean every single) process, you'd have to reboot the host because it would be unusable. The command killall doesn't meant to do that, see post #5.
Reboot does much more, it's not just a kill command, that's the difference.

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