Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 21 Jul 2002 16:33:41 +0200 (CEST) | From | Jos Hulzink <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] strict VM overcommit |
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On Sun, 21 Jul 2002, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On 21 Jul 2002, Alan Cox wrote: > > > I would suggest you do something quite different. Go and read what K&R > > had to say about the design of Unix. One of the design goals of Unix is > > that the system does not think it knows better than the administrator. > > That is one of the reasons unix works well and is so flexible. > > The problem is that at the time K&R said this only real men (tm) were > administrators of UNIX systems. Nowadays clueless people like me are > administrators of their Linux system at home. ;-) > > With enough stupidity root can always trash his system but if as Robert > says the state of the system will be that "no allocations will succeed" > which seems to be a synonymous for "the system is practically dead" it is > IMHO a good idea to let "swapoff -a return -ENOMEM". >
Maybe it is an option to add the --I_know_Im_stupid option to the swapoff command line ? (Also known as the --force flag). This way we can both return an error when the OS lacks memory and force a swapoff.
Agreed, the system is practically dead when no allocations will succeed, but maybe killing user tasks when root needs memory or something is an option... (Better a few angry users than a crashed server, besides, it is not something that should happen every day)
Jos
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