According to Jukka Marin:
> 
> Umm.. I'm just thinking of the situation where I have a server 400 km from
> here, running out of swap and only allowing new root processes to run..
> and the systems I configure never allow root logins from network.. so I
> can't log in to kill the memory hogs.. ;-)  It would help if I could
> allow some user like "operator" to have the same memory allocation
> privileges as root, so I could log in, su to root and kill something.
> 
Makes me think that we should represent the entire sysctl tree as a 
filesystem (Plan 9 keeps crawling around in my mind) with different 
permissions on different branches and leaves.  Then allowing operator 
to alter the water marks would be merely a matter of setting the right 
group permissions on that particular sysctl flag.

I _am_ going to look at the portal filesystem one of these days...

++L