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Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 18:34:46 +0000 (GMT)
From: James Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk>
To: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
cc: Raul Miller <moth@magenta.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: guarantee_memory() syscall?
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On 29 Oct 2000, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> Raul Miller <moth@magenta.com> writes:
> 
> > Can anyone tell me about the viability of a guarantee_memory() syscall?
> > 
> > [I'm thinking: it would either kill the process, or allocate all virtual
> > memory needed for its shared libraries, buffers, allocated memory, etc.
> > Furthermore, it would render this process immune to the OOM killer,
> > unless it allocated further memory.]
> 
> Except for the OOM killer semantics mlockall already exists.

More to the point, "immortality" is NOT a desirable "feature": the OOM
killer just kills things which must be killed to protect the overall
system. We'll have a finely adjustable memory killer daemon soon, which
will be a better solution.


James.

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