Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 21 Mar 2000 09:14:39 -0800 (PST) | From | David Whysong <> | Subject | Re: Some questions about linux kernel. |
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On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Richard B. Johnson wrote: > >It is yes. The purpose of the daemon is to monitor the system and >prevent an out of memory condition from existing. The kernel should >never kill anything (unless asked). Killing a task is policy. It >is specified by the administrator and administered by the daemon.
But a user-space program might not get a timeslice before some fork() or malloc() bomb runs the system out of virtual memory, at which point only the kernel is guaranteed to properly function. I don't think you can solve this problem without the kernel killing tasks.
The daemon should assign priorities to tasks as they are started, thus keeping policy in user-space. Then when OOM situations occur, the kernel already knows which tasks go to the firing squad.
Dave
David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara My public PGP keys are on my web page - http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~dwhysong DSS PGP Key 0x903F5BD6 : FE78 91FE 4508 106F 7C88 1706 B792 6995 903F 5BD6 D-H PGP key 0x5DAB0F91 : BC33 0F36 FCCD E72C 441F 663A 72ED 7FB7 5DAB 0F91
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