Re: can I bring Linux down by running "renice -20 cpu_intensive_process"?

[Måns Rullgård]

Lee Revell <rlrevell@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 22:01 +0000, Måns Rullgård wrote:
>> Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> 
>> >>Subject: can I bring Linux down by running "renice -20
>> >>cpu_intensive_process"?
>> >>
>> > Depends on what the cpu_intensive_process does. If it tries to
>> > allocate lots of memory, maybe. If it's _just_ CPU (as in `perl
>> > -e '1 while 1'`), you get a chance that you can input some
>> > commands on a terminal to kill it.  SCHED_FIFO'ing or
>> > SCHED_RR'ing such a process is sudden death of course.
>> 
>> Sysrq+n changes all realtime tasks to normal priority.
>> 
>
> A nice -20 SCHED_OTHER task is not realtime, only SCHED_FIFO and
> SCHED_RR.

Maybe extending sysrq+n to lower the priority of -20 tasks would be a
good idea.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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