On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
>
> > It then looks like a legitimate process, and other things die
> > :-)
> >
> > > People have actually tried this and my patch seems to
> > > catch the hog just fine :)
> >
> > Any sufficiently well-coded bomb is indistinguishable from an
> > innocent unattended package :-)
>
> Indeed. There is always a way to fool any OOM killer.
> The only thing that could save us here are proper
> per-user resource limits, but even then we'd still want
> an emergency OOM killer to rescue the system in situations
> where we hit the wall...
Of course :)
Don't get me wrong - the patch is a MAJOR improvement. Splatting
suspicious looking processes in self-defence is vastly preferable to
sitting back and watching a malicious or simply misguided resource hog
blow the whole server away!
(One possibility we haven't mentioned so far is bringing more swapspace on
line as an "emergency" measure. Many servers will have a chunk of free
space somewhere; if we could bring this online as swap space, this could
avert some problems temporarily. Windows Not Tested has a similar
facility, to expand swapspace as needed within predefined limits. I might
look into this further...)
James.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 15 2000 - 21:00:30 EST