Open Radar

 
23-Oct-2011 06:46 AM Steven Parkes:
Summary:

Sometimes, for some reason, Xcode 4.2 / OS X Lion get into a state where iOS simulated apps become zombies. The parent process of the simulated app is the user launchd which apparently never waits for the app. This causes Xcode to be unable to launch the app again (the "can't register with bootstrap" message). Logging out and logging back in doesn't seem to fix it (I thought it would restart the user launchd but it doesn't seem to) so it requires a system reboot.

Steps to Reproduce:

I've seen this twice in the last week. I never saw it before Xcode 4.2. I'm not exactly sure what triggers it, if it's stopping a build/load in process or what. If I can narrow down the conditions on which it occurs, I'll update the but report.

01-Nov-2011 07:49 AM Steven Parkes:
Just happened again. In this case, I was debugging an app in the simulator under GDB and it was stopped at a GDB prompt. I switched the device (iphone to ipad) and did a run and it wedged with a zombie.

I tried to get launchctl to stop the old process but couldn't figure out any label it would allow. It lists the label as

78841	-	UIKitApplication:com.snapsly.ios[0xfe6b]



01-Mar-2012 03:49 PM Steven Parkes:
More information beyond the original report:

This is not exactly a problem with zombies processes. It appears to be an issue with the bootstrap name server not getting terminated processes removed. In particular, it's possible to force launchd to wait for the zombies which removes them, but the root problem, that the bootstrap name server still has an entry for the app name, is not solved.

This gets A LOT of hits on stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/7860828/191215

There's a lot of extra information in my answer and in the comments attached to it.

I've noticed this even more with Lion/Xcode 4.3.