From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from burns.conectiva (burns.conectiva [10.0.0.4]) by postfix.conectiva.com.br (Postfix) with SMTP id 6FC9716E65 for ; Thu, 22 Mar 2001 07:22:58 -0300 (EST) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 06:24:57 -0300 (BRST) From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Patrick O'Rourke , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 22 Mar 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > Is there ever a case where killing init is the right thing to do? My > impression is that if init is selected the whole machine dies. If you > can kill init and still have a machine that mostly works, then I guess > it makes some sense not to kill it. > > Guaranteeing not to select init can buy you piece of mind because > init if properly setup can put the machine back together again, while > not special casing init means something weird might happen and init > would be selected. When something weird happens, it might be better to kill init and have the machine reset itself after the panic (echo 30 > /proc/sys/kernel/panic). Killing all other things and leaving just init intact makes for a machine which is as good as dead, without a chance for recovery-by-reboot... OTOH, I haven't heard of the OOM killer ever chosing init, not even of people who tried creating these special kinds of situations to trigger it on purpose. regards, Rik -- Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose... http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com.br/ -- 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/