From: wong@cs.tu-berlin.de (Wolfgang Jung) Subject: Re: What happens when Linux runs out of memory? [was Thought: compressed libc ?] Date: 21 Mar 1993 12:05:18 GMT
Hannu Kotipalo (nite@phoenix.oulu.fi) wrote:
: Joel M. Hoffman (joel@wam.umd.edu) wrote:
: : > Somebody wrote:
: : >Linux does something that is a mix between 2 and 3. I does kill a
: : >process (essentially randomly), but in practice linux will try to run
: : >with too little memory for too long, and you'll get a machine that is
: : >mostly unusable - it's probably much faster to reboot and fsck than to
: : >wait for linux to give up and kill something. Add RAM or swapspace if
: : >this happens to you.
: :
: : I think this is currently one of the biggest limitations of Linux. My
: : errant process can bring the whole system to its knees. It would be
: : nice if the kernel killed processes in descending order of nice-level,
: : so, e.g., root could be logged in -1, and be sure not to be killed.
: :
: : Also, I've noticed the seemingly interminable wait when Linux runs out
: : of memory. Perhaps a hot-key to tell the kernel that it's out of
: : memory would help until something better is implemented? It's a
: : kludge, I know, but it's better than rebooting. No?
: :
: : -Joel
: Why does it not automatically make a temporal swap file?
I donot know the amount pf work which would be involved in the follwoing :
Why not implemenmt an resizing swapfile, whch can be presized to a certain
size (iE 10M) and if mre is needed the kernel just adds more to the file, and
if the space is free again, the kernel can free the swapspace again.
As the Kernel needs the FS for the swpafile already it shouldn't be too bad to
add this feature.
Nevertheless I don't know how much work is needed fr this to do :-(
But this would be a nice feature...
Gruss
Wolfgang