Re: [PATCH] oom_pardon, aka don't kill my xlock

Jon Masters
2004-09-24T22:57:54Z

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 01:45:20 +0200, Andries Brouwer <aebr@win.tue.nl> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 01:23:08AM +0200, Thomas Habets wrote:

> > How about a sysctl that does "for the love of kbaek, don't ever kill these
> > processes when OOM. If nothing else can be killed, I'd rather you panic"?

> An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes
> with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel
> and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was
> insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by
> the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF
> (out-of-fuel) mechanism.

For the curious I have recently been reading about this (I'm a nervous
flyer, you wouldn't believe the kind of statistics I scare myself
with) and discovered the term RAT - RAM Air Turbine. In the event of
fuel running out, modern aircraft automatically drop this turbine and
generate sufficient power for navigation (and hopefully safe landing).
There's a famous early 1980s case in Canada known as the Gimli Glider
in which this actually ended up happing after a computer that
performed imperial/metric conversion failed and the manual calculation
was wrong - they coined a popular Canadian phrase because of this.

What we need is a mechanism to have a giant brainstraw emerge from the
front casing of the machine and suck the brains out of the guy running
a server with overcommit issues.

[ Alan has a working model super drinking straw from OLS - pity you
destroyed it. ]

Jon.