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

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

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