Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Philipp Rumpf
2001-03-22T19:29:02Z

On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 01:14:41AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br> writes:
> Is there ever a case where killing init is the right thing to do?

There are cases where panic() is the right thing to do. Broken init
is such a case.

> My impression is that if init is selected the whole machine dies.
> If you can kill init and still have a machine that mostly works,

you can't.

> Guaranteeing not to select init can buy you piece of mind because
> init if properly setup can put the machine back together again, while
> not special casing init means something weird might happen and init
> would be selected.

If we're in a situation where long-running processes with relatively
small VM are killed the box is very unlikely to be usable anyway.