Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 14 Mar 2000 20:20:09 +0000 (GMT) | | From | James Sutherland <> | | Subject | Re: Some questions about linux kernel. |
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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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