Re: [patch] 2.2.10 buffer patch (OOM)

Frank van Maarseveen (fvm@tasking.nl)
Fri, 9 Jul 1999 10:39:27 +0200

On Thu, Jul 08, 1999 at 08:03:18PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> o kupdate replaces completly update. It's a separate and alone
> kernel daemon. It has no way to be killed and it won't be swapped
> out. We need kupdate mainly if the machine goes OOM.

I never realized this could happen. Occasionally some of our machines runs
out of memory because of bad user programs. But, instead of moving every
program to the kernel why not creating a kind of "minfree" parameter
for memory+swap instead? This has already been done for file systems
and IMO it makes sense to do this for memory+swap as well. Whenever
an essential daemon runs as non-root then that might be handled by doing
something like

echo 0 >/proc/$!/cap/minfreemem

in the corresponding startup script, should it be necessary. Not
all daemons are essential for proper operation of the system.
I guess one must be root to change the capabilities in this case.

-- 
Frank


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