Re: A true story of a crash.

Peter T. Breuer (ptb@it.uc3m.es)
Sat, 15 Aug 1998 21:11:02 +0200 (MET DST)


"A month of sundays ago Matt Agler wrote:"
>
> Admittedly, root would need to allocate memory and so any root processes
> should probably be exempt. If the box was administered right, I think
> this would be a workable scheme. ext2fs does a similar thing with regards
> to reserving space for root also, so there's a precident here I think.

Agreed. The ability to reserve some memory space for root processes is the
minimum requirement for being able to implement a recovery strategy in _user_
_space_. Therefore it must be right.

You can run non-vital daemons as bin or daemon. You can log in as root and
kill them.

Reserving 5% or 1M, whichever is least, would seem to be the best default
strategy. Low memory machines could disable the reserve.

> -Matt

Peter

PS - this brings up the question of whether one should be able to quota
memory space as well as disk space. Probably. Requests for more memory
are relatively infrequent.

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