Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

[Eric W. Biederman]

Jonathan Morton <[e-mail]> writes:

> >It would make much sense to make the oom killer
> >leave not just root processes alone but processes belonging to a UID
> >lower
> >then a certain value as well (500). This would be:
> >
> >1. Easly managable by the admin. Just let oracle/www and analogous users
> >   have a UID lower then let's say 500.
> 
> That sounds vaguely sensible.  However, make it a "much less likely" rather
> than an "impossible", otherwise we end up with an unkillable runaway root
> process killing everything else in userland.
> 
> I'm still in favour of a failing malloc(), and I'm currently reading a bit
> of source and docs to figure out where this should be done and why it isn't
> done now.  So far I've found the overcommit_memory flag, which looks kinda
> promising.

Lookup mlock & mlock_all they will handle the single process case.

Of course if you OOM you still have problems but that should make
them much harder to trigger.

Eric