Re: User space out of memory approach

[Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 01:35:47AM +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 18:05 -0200, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > The feature is interesting - several similar patches have been around with similar
> > functionality (people who need usually write their own, I've seen a few), but none 
> > has ever been merged, even though it is an important requirement for many users.
> 
> It's not a requirement for users. The current implementation in the
> kernel it's just broken, ugly code.
> 
> > This is simple, an ordered list of candidate PIDs. IMO something similar to this 
> > should be merged. Andrew ?
> 
> I have no objections against the userspace provided candidate list
> option, but as long as the main sources of trouble 
> 
> 	- invocation
> 	- reentrancy
> 	- timed, counted, blah ugly protection
> 	- selection problem
> 
> are not fixed properly, we don't need to discuss the inclusion of a
> userspace provided candidate list.
> 
> Postpone this until the main problem is fixed. There is a proper
> confirmed fix for this available. It was posted more than once.

Agreed - haven't you and Andrea fixed those recently ?

> Merging a fix which helps only 0,001 % of the users to hide the mess
> instead of fixing the real problem is a real interesting engineering
> aproach.
> 
> I don't deny, that after the source of trouble is fixed it is worth to
> think about the merging of this addon to allow interested users to
> define the culprits instead of relying on an always imperfect selection
> algorithm.

Yep.