In article <m0zqJsp-0009LvC@most.weird.com> tech-kern@netbsd.org (NetBSD Kernel Technical Discussion List) writes:
>
>As Christos mentioned, AIX does as well, but they took the "easy" way
>out and made the signal used to kill big processes both reliable
>(i.e. the system was never supposed to hang), and catchable (so that
>processes in the know could avoid an untimely death).
>

Well, SIGDANGER can be ignored, but if no swap is found you get a SIGKILL
after that... And it is pretty damned hard to ignore SIGKILL. Last time
I had the misfortune of using AIX, each time I compiled something, I would
end up close to out of swap and the OS would pick the Xserver as the big
idle process to kill :-( Then I believe an environment variable was added
that would make sure that you really got the memory you asked for.

Finally you can always bzero the memory you allocate :-) for some performance
penalty.


christos