Comment # 2 on bug 1127000 from Bruce Rogers

What I am seeing is that the parent of the zombied smbd processes is smbd. As I
understand it, the parent is the at fault when a child gets left in a zombie
state. I'm adding David Mulder, samba engineer, to see what perspective he
might have on this.

I'll continue to try to do more investigations.

Since I assumed that non-root usage of smbd is quite a bit less common, I
guessed that I might not see this issue if I did the test as root, but I still
see these defunct processes when running qemu (and subsequently the spawned
smbd process) as root, so I'm dropping that line of investigation.

I was watching on pstree to see what was happening and here's what I've seen:
...
... ������qemu-system-x86(18633)���������smbd(19726)���������cleanupd(19729)
... ���                        ���             ������smbd(19931)
... ���                        ���             ������smbd-notifyd(19728)

The 19931 process then, after some time becomes zombied.

I've not investigated this much further but it seems that normally there isn't
a smbd child of smbd parent, So this may indicate something has gone wrong
within smbd in our case.