Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 23 Mar 2001 13:43:20 -0500 (EST) | From | <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init |
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Please point me to an Operating System that runs on any commonly available platform and fits your requirements. Nick
On Fri, 23 Mar 2001 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:04:07PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > This is just an escape route in case everything else has failed. > > > > > > Linux is unreliable. > > > That is bad. > > > > Since your definition of reliability is a mathematical abstraction requiring > > infinite storage why don't you start by inventing infinitely large SDRAM > > chips, then get back to us ? > > Ah, Alan, > I can see that you dislike seeing me say bad things about Linux. > I dislike having to say them. > > On the other hand, my definition of reliability does not require > infinite storage. After all, earlier Unix flavours did not need > an OOM killer either, and my editor was not killed under Unix V6 > on 64k when I started some other process. > > Linux is unreliable because a program can be killed at random, > without warning, because of bugs in some other program. > The old Unix guarantee that a program only crashes because of > its own behaviour is lost. That is very sad. > > What can one do? I need not tell you - you know better than I do. > The main point is letting malloc fail when the memory cannot be > guaranteed. There are various solutions for stack space, none of > them very elegant, but all have in common that when we run out of > stack space the program doing that gets SIGSEGV, and not some > random other program. (And a well-written program could catch this > SIGSEGV and do cleanup, preserving the integrity of its data base. > Clearly one would want to guarantee a certain minimum stack space > at fork time.) > > Will this setup be very inefficient? I don't know. Perhaps. > If my programs actually use 10 MB but have a guarantee for > 200 MB then the rest of that memory is not wasted. But it can > only be used for things that can be freed when needed, like > inode and buffer cache. > > But inefficient or not, I much prefer a system with guarantees, > something that is reliable by default, above something that > works well if you are lucky and fails at unpredictable moments. > > Andries > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ >
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