Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Guest section DW
2001-03-22T11:48:32Z

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 08:48:54PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Patrick O'Rourke wrote:

> > Since the system will panic if the init process is chosen by
> > the OOM killer, the following patch prevents select_bad_process()
> > from picking init.

There is a dozen other processes that must not be killed.
Init is just a random example.

> One question ... has the OOM killer ever selected init on
> anybody's system ?

Last week I installed SuSE 7.1 somewhere.
During the install: "VM: killing process rpm",
leaving the installer rather confused.
(An empty machine, 256MB, 144MB swap, I think 2.2.18.)

Last month I had a computer algebra process running for a week.
Killed. But this computation was the only task this machine had.
Its sole reason of existence.
Too bad - zero information out of a week's computation.
(I think 2.4.0.)

Clearly, Linux cannot be reliable if any process can be killed
at any moment. I am not happy at all with my recent experiences.

Andries