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

Nick Piggin
2004-09-23T00:01:56Z

Thomas Habets wrote:
> Hello.
>
> 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"?
>
> Examples for this list would be /usr/bin/vlock and /usr/X11R6/bin/xlock.
> I just got a very uncomfortable surprise when found my box unlocked thanks to
> this.
>
> After playing around a bit, I made the patch below, but it's almost completely
> untested. I'm not even sure I take the binaries name from the right place.
> And I don't know if the locking can race. If it's too ugly then it'd be great
> if someone implemented it the right way. (iow: huge fucking disclaimer)
>
> echo "/usr/bin/vlock /usr/X11R6/bin/xlock" > /proc/sys/vm/oom_pardon
>

Hi,
Nice idea. It could probably made include-worthy if you just set a flag in the
task struct in question.

Also, use pid numbers instead of names, I think. (Or prctl? What is the
'preferred' way of setting random per-process flags?)

Nick