Re: Possibly unfreezable system?

[Keith Owens]

On Sat, 4 Aug 2001 14:52:14 -0700, 
Nicholas Knight <[e-mail]> wrote:
>I've lately seen many complaints regarding the inability to even access a 
>system that something (such as kswapd) is going crazy on.
>The solution, to me, seems simple, have the kernel reserve some extra RAM 
>at boot (a few megs), and dictate that it get at least X amount of 
>processor time, consistantly, to allow for the following:
>An alt-sysrq key that switches to a certain virtual console, kills 
>whatever might already be running there, and allow a person to log in in 
>order to kill whatever is causing the system to freeze, run out of 
>memory, etc. The program(s) running here would run in that extra RAM the 
>kernel reserved at boot.

It already exists and is called kdb.
ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/kdb/download/ix86