Re: General Question...

Harald Koenig (koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de)
Mon, 30 Mar 1998 15:04:38 +0200


On Mar 30, Alan Cox wrote:

> > zero? I know, it's not SUPPOSED to happen, but saying it did, should the
> > kernel halt and die, or try to kill off processes trying to malloc more
> > memory, or what?
>
> It should start killing processes as they allocate stuff. That can have
> bad effects if it happens to pick X11 [yes back to that topic again its
> another reason for a little kernel side mode switching]

I know this has been discussed before but I don't know the answers or arguments
anymore so I have to ask again:

is there any chance for future Linux kernels (2.1 or 2.3) that in such a case
kernel might pick _another_ process? maybe the capability bitmap would
give a chance to have DONT_KILL_ME_IF_RUNNING_OUT_OF_MEMORY bit which then
would allow to look for another (next largest?) process?

I know this won't help if just this process (e.g. Xserver) is leaking memory,
but it will keep your X display (or database server or whatever) up running
if any other process is leaking (mad user program, netscape, weird physicist, ...;)

Harald

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