Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Szabolcs Szakacsits
2001-03-23T19:26:37Z

On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> One of the things that we badly need to resurrect for 2.5 is the
> beancounter work which would let you reasonably do things like
> guaranteed Oracle a certain amount of the machine, or restrict all
> the untrusted users to a total of 200Mb hard limit between them etc

This would improve Linux reliability but it could be much better with
added *optional* non-overcommit (most other OS also support this, also
that's the default mostly [please no, "but it deadlocks" because it's
not true, they also kill processes (Solaris, etc)]), reserved superuser
memory (ala Solaris, True64, etc when OOM in non-overcommit, users
complain and superuser acts, not the OS killing their tasks) and
superuser *advisory* OOM killer [there was patch for this before], I
think in the last area Linux is already more ahead than others at
present.

About the "use resource limits!". Yes, this is one solution. The
*expensive* solution (admin time, worse resource utilization, etc).
Others make it cheaper mixing with the above ones.

Szaka