kswapd killable considered harmful

Miquel van Smoorenburg (miquels@cistron.nl)
20 Jan 1999 20:55:59 +0100


In the 2.2.0-preX series kswapd appears to be killable by a normal
user process. Since there is no way to restart it, this is harmful.

Most if not all Linux distribution use either "kill -15 -1" or
"killall5 -15" and later with -9 when going down or going to
single user mode to make sure all processes are gone. This will
kill kswapd. Especially when going multi usre -> single user ->
multi user this is problematic.

If killall5 is used, it could try to work around this by not killing
processes called "kswapd", but how can the ksapd process be
uniquely identified to prevent users from starting up processes
called "kswapd" that will never get killed (and thus prevent
unmounting filesystems when going down etc) ?

I'd prefer it if kswapd was made unkillable again.

Mike.

-- 
Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

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