On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 12:01:43PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > Last month I had a computer algebra process running for a week.
> > Killed. But this computation was the only task this machine had.
> > Its sole reason of existence.
> > Too bad - zero information out of a week's computation.
> >
> > Clearly, Linux cannot be reliable if any process can be killed
> > at any moment. I am not happy at all with my recent experiences.
>
> Note that the OOM killer in 2.4 won't kick in until your machine
> is out of both memory and swap, see mm/oom_kill.c::out_of_memory().
Nevertheless, this process does malloc and malloc returns the requested
memory. If a malloc fails the computer algebra process has the choice
between various alternatives. Present a prompt, so that the user can
examine variables and intermediate results, or request a dump to disk
of the status of the computation. Or choose an alternative algorithm,
at some other point of the space-time tradeoff curve.
But no error return from malloc - just "Killed". Ach.
Andries
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 23 2001 - 21:00:18 EST