ait4() doesn't see any child. But this doesn't mean ->children list is empty, we may have EXIT_DEAD tasks which are not visible to do_wait(). In that case the subsequent forget_original_parent() will crash the kernel because it will try to re-parent these tasks to the NULL reaper. Even if there are no childs, it is not good that forget_original_parent() uses reaper == NULL. Change the code to set ->child_reaper = init_pid_ns.child_reaper instead. We could use pid_ns->parent->child_reaper as well, I think this does not really matter. These EXIT_DEAD tasks are not visible to the new ->parent after re-parenting, they will silently do release_task() eventually. Note that we must change ->child_reaper, otherwise forget_original_parent() will use reaper == father, and in that case we will hit the (correct) BUG_ON(!list_empty(&father->children)). Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov Acked-by: Serge Hallyn Acked-by: Sukadev Bhattiprolu Acked-by: Pavel Emelyanov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds N