Re: why swap at all?

[Tim Connors]

Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx said on Tue, 01 Jun 2004 15:02:48 -0400:
> --==_Exmh_482188856P
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> On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 20:36:23 +0200, FabF said:
> 
> > I guess we have a design problem right here.We could add per-process
> > swappiness attribute.That swap thread becomes boring coz we're looking
> > globally what's going wrong locally.
> 
> Hmm.. do we need to worry about the same DoS issues we need to worry about with
> mlock and friends?  I know I can trust myself to not do stupid things to said
> flags on my laptop (well... not twice anyhow ;).  On the other hand, I have
> systems with clueless users, and the even more dangerous half-clued users.  And
> then I have a bunch of machines in our security lab, where Bad Things happen
> all the time... 

I do often get frustrated that the DoS card is brought up to kill a
potentially useful solution. I think there should be a flag in KConfig
saying "This machine will be a server"/"This machine will be mostly a
single user desktop machine". In the latter, you can enable all these
vm/etc heuristics that will help out mozilla/X/your favourite
bloat-ware, but potentially enable a DoS attack, and in the former,
you stay conservative.

I can't rememeber the situation that I was last annoyed by someone
saying "but what about a DoS?"...

-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
Entropy requires no maintenance.
                -- Markoff Chaney
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