On Wed, 14 Jul 1999, John Nemeth wrote:

> On Jul 15,  2:40am, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
> } Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> } > At 12:20 AM +0900 7/15/99, Daniel C. Sobral wrote:
> } > > In which case the program that consumed all memory will be killed.
> } > > The program killed is +NOT+ the one demanding memory, it's the one
> } > > with most of it.
> } > 
> } > But that isn't always the best process to have killed off...
> } 
> } Sure it is. :-) Let's see...
> 
>      This statement is absurd.  Only a comptetant admin can decide
> which process can be killed.  No arbitrary decision is going to be
> correct.
> 
> } > It would be nice to have a way to indicate that, a la SIGDANGER.

How about assigning something like a class to process, which gives VM
 a hint which processes should be killed first without much thinking, and
which the last (or never)? In other words, let's say class 10 means
"totally disposable, kill whenever you want", and class 1 means "never try
to kill me". Of course, most processes would get some default value, and
superuser could "renice" them to more resistant class.

This way both sides of the discussion would be satisfied :-)

Andrzej Bialecki

//  <abial@webgiro.com> WebGiro AB, Sweden (http://www.webgiro.com)
// -------------------------------------------------------------------
// ------ FreeBSD: The Power to Serve. http://www.freebsd.org --------
// --- Small & Embedded FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ ----