Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Jordi Polo
2001-03-22T23:10:29Z

Just a silly thing , think about a system with a process in charge of the
security of the system, it avoid the script kiddies make funny things with
it, log every etc. Now think this machine in an OOM situation, what will you
prefer trashing and an unusable machine or that oom kill , kills that really
important process, the machines continues going on and the script kiddies
make all the fun of it ?
I really think , killing that process is not the right thing and that we have:
1.- make some warnings to the apps, like malloc returning ENOMEM ,
2.- as long as trashing is almost never desired keep the oom kill code but
make it more powerful allowing the sysadmin to control which pids will NEVER
get killed even if that means trashing and system going down, we can make
some pids default reliable like init or things like that but it could be
changed for instance via /proc

--
Jordi Polo