Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

george anzinger
2001-03-23T22:06:36Z

What happens if you just make swap VERY large? Does the system thrash
it self to a virtual standstill? Is this a possible answer? Supposedly
you could then sneak in and blow away the bad guys manually ...

George

Paul Jakma wrote:
>
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:
>
> > About the "use resource limits!". Yes, this is one solution. The
> > *expensive* solution (admin time, worse resource utilization, etc).
>
> traditional user limits have worse resource utilisation? think what
> kind of utilisation a guaranteed allocation system would have. instead
> of 128MB, you'd need maybe a GB of RAM and many many GB of swap for
> most systems.
>
> some hopefully non-ranting points:
>
> - setting up limits on a RH system takes 1 minute by editing
> /etc/security/limits.conf.
>
> - Rik's current oom killer may not do a good job now, but it's
> impossible for it to do a /perfect/ job without implementing
> kernel/esp.c.
>
> - with limits set you will have:
> - /possible/ underutilisation on some workloads.
> - chance of hitting Rik's OOM killer reduced to almost nothing.
>
> no matter how good or bad Rik's killer is, i'd much rather set limits
> and just about /never/ have it invoked.
>
> more beancounting will make limits more useful (eg global?) and maybe
> dists can start setting up some kind of limits by default at install
> time based on the RAM installed and whether user selected
> server/workstation/etc.. install.
>
> Then hopefully we can be a little less concerned about how close Rik
> gets to the impossible task of implementing esp.c.
>
> > Szaka
>
> --paulj
>
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