What is PID 0? · blog.dave.tf
I get nerd-sniped a lot. People offhandedly ask something innocent, and I lose the next several hours (or in this case, days) comprehensively figuring out the answer. Usually this ends up in a rant thread on mastodon or in some private chat group or other. But for once I have the energy to write one up for the blog.
The very short version: Unix PIDs do start at 0! PID 0 just isn’t shown to userspace through traditional APIs. PID 0 starts the kernel, then retires to a quiet life of helping a bit with process scheduling and power management. Also the entire web is mostly wrong about PID 0, because of one sentence on Wikipedia from 16 years ago.
At time of writing, if you go ask the web about PID 0, you’ll get a mix of incorrect and misleading information, and almost no correct answers.
After figuring out the truth, I asked Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Kagi what PID 0 is on linux. I looked through the top 20 results for each, as well as whatever knowledge boxes and AI word salads they organically gave me. That’s 2 pages of results on Google, for reference.
