From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <20010324010306.A6702@win.tue.nl> Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 01:03:06 +0100 From: Guest section DW Subject: Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init References: <20010322124727.A5115@win.tue.nl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: ; from James A. Sutherland on Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:26:22PM +0000 Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "James A. Sutherland" Cc: Rik van Riel , Patrick O'Rourke , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:26:22PM +0000, James A. Sutherland wrote: > > Clearly, Linux cannot be reliable if any process can be killed > > at any moment. > > What on earth did you expect to happen when the process exceeded the > machine's capabilities? Using more than all the resources fails. There > isn't an alternative. That is the wrong way to phrase these things. Large processes usually do not have a definite set of needed resources. They can use lots of memory for buffers and cache and hash and be a bit faster, or use much less and be a bit slower. Linux first promises a lot of memory, but then fails to deliver, without returning any error to the program. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/