Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Guest section DW
2001-03-24T00:03:06Z

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:26:22PM +0000, James A. Sutherland wrote:

> > Clearly, Linux cannot be reliable if any process can be killed
> > at any moment.
>
> What on earth did you expect to happen when the process exceeded the
> machine's capabilities? Using more than all the resources fails. There
> isn't an alternative.

That is the wrong way to phrase these things.
Large processes usually do not have a definite set of needed resources.
They can use lots of memory for buffers and cache and hash and be a bit
faster, or use much less and be a bit slower.
Linux first promises a lot of memory, but then fails to deliver,
without returning any error to the program.