Actually, gpm at the console as well as typing at the console is affected.
Everything is affected. I have had this happen many more times on a server
without X running because of one reason or another. The recent Apache DoS
attack comes to mind. Resource limits aren't all that useful when the
server is designed specifically as a web server and *should* get 99% of
the memory. Limits are in place to try and keep this to a minimum, but
the odd occurance does happen.
Back to the story. Userland control becomes fairly non-existant. Whether
this is my personal workstation or a server, the situation needs to be
resolved immediately and userland is way too slow to do this.
I don't consider waiting 10 minutes for ctrl-alt-del to take effect a
proper solution. The kernel overcommits memory which is a necessary and
desirable feature; the kernel needs to help me recover. The last entry on
the list, putting everyone to sleep and waking up the userland daemon to
deal with things is IMO a fair solution.
-d
-- Look, look, see Windows 98. Buy, lemmings, buy! (c) 1998 David Ford. Redistribution via the Microsoft Network is prohibited. for linux-kernel: please read linux/Documentation/* before posting problems
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html