Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> writes:
>     Fine...  you have ultimate design control over every process running on
>     the system. Simply set appropriate resource limits for the processes 
>     run by the system and you are done.  

For some value of ultimate control.

Reality these days is that if you want an embedded system based on
UNIX that both doesn't suck and that has the features you need, you
have to take _some_ off the shelf software components, glue them
together as simply as possible, and do what you can to squeeze
realiability out of them.

There are many ways to squeeze reliability, with respect to memory
consumption.

One of them is hand-tuning resource limits for the applications, as
you mention (and as I suggested in a previous e-mail).  However, this
can be difficult to get right (but there's a safety margin), or, for
some applications, impossible to do reasonably at all.

You can attempt to deny it, but another valuable one is being able to
detect without panic or without processes being killed that the system
is out of memory, and the most sane way of doing that is with resource
preallocation.  Yes, it's conservative, but there's no reliable
alternative that i'm aware of.



cgd
-- 
Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.