Re: [RFC] New ideas for the OOM handler

From: Matthew Dharm (mdharm-kernel@one-eyed-alien.net)
Date: Mon Oct 09 2000 - 20:31:47 EST

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 09:25:38PM -0400, Byron Stanoszek wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Jochen Striepe wrote:
> > What about a user-defined list of "wishes"? The administrator should be
> > enabled to enforce that specific processes are to be terminated only as a
> > last resource (syslogd), or that they should be killed first (netscape).
> > Could that be done using some /proc interface - some lines, each
> > containing a program name, and a modifier for the killing priority?
>
> echo "init" > /proc/sys/oom-ignore
> echo "httpd" >> /proc/sys/oom-ignore
> echo "parallel-fft" >> /proc/sys/oom-ignore
> etc...
>
> This is a very workable option. It allows the admin to define what is
> "important" on his computer and tells the OOM killer to terminate at
> last resort (or ignore completely).

I'd be concerned with the security implications of this feature... after
all, I can edit argv[0] to change the name of my program -- a malicious
application could do this to attempt to "hide" from the OOM Killer.

Matt 

-- 
Matthew Dharm                              Home: mdharm-usb@one-eyed-alien.net 
Maintainer, Linux USB Mass Storage Driver

I want my GPFs!!!
					-- Stef
User Friendly, 11/9/1998
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