Re: Out of memory kernel death

Peter Mutsaers (plm@lucent.com)
12 May 1997 11:56:00 +0200


>> On Wed, 7 May 1997 09:43:54 -0400, "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU> said:

TYT> From: Rik van Riel <Rik.vanRiel@phil.ruu.nl>
TYT> Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 15:24:43 +0200 (MET DST)

TYT> I read this thread and linux does indead have this problem.
TYT> I also read the FreeBSD sourcecode, and saw a (somewhat)
TYT> elegant solution for this. If FreeBSD is out of memory, it
TYT> looks through the processes and kills off the largest one.
TYT> This should be doable in Linux too...

TYT> The problem is that the largest process is often the X
TYT> server. Often this will indeed free a lot of memory, but
TYT> it's not necessarily the best thing to do...

In the case of protection against a run-away process often this
process will be the largest one. In those cases, it will help.

-- 
Peter Mutsaers      Lucent Technologies, Network Systems
plm@lucent.com      Huizen, the Netherlands