Andreas Dilger wrote:
> Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> > X, and any other big friendly processes, could participate in
> > memory balancing operations. X could be made to clean out a
>
> Gerrit Huizenga wrote:
> > Anyway, there is/was an API in PTX to say (either from in-kernel or through
> > some user machinations) "I Am a System Process". Turns on a bit in the
>
> On AIX there is a signal called SIGDANGER, which is basically what you
> are looking for. By default it is ignored, but for processes that care
> (e.g. init, X, whatever) they can register a SIGDANGER handler. At an
> "urgent" (as oposed to "critical") OOM situation, all processes get a
> SIGDANGER sent to them. Most will ignore it, but ones with handlers
> can free caches, try to do a clean shutdown, whatever. Any process with
> a SIGDANGER handler get a reduction of "badness" (as the OOM killer calls
> it) when looking for processes to kill.
>
> Having a SIGDANGER handler is good for 2 reasons:
> 1) Lets processes know when memory is short so they can free needless cache.
> 2) Mark process with a SIGDANGER handler as "more important" than those
> without. Most people won't care about this, but init, and X, and
> long-running simulations might.
Is there any reason why we can't do something like this for 2.5?
-d
--
"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are
virtue and talents", Thomas Jefferson [1742-1826], 3rd US President
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 15 2000 - 21:00:14 EST