linux still croaks badly under memory overload

Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Sat, 24 Jul 1999 00:02:21 +0200

I launched a latex2html that ate all my memory,
and my whole machine croaked so much as to be unusable.
XEmacs would take minutes to print one character,
and you could see the fvwm pager redrawing window information,
so that I preferred to reboot rather than wait hours for X to process
the pending Ctrl-Alt-F1 and Ctrl-Alt-BkSp,
not to talk about the possibility of more croaking at a shell
that could identify the bad processes and kill them.
YES, it could have been better had I known how to use MAGIC_SYSRQ,
but it was too late to less /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt.

So, my question is:
would there be a way for linux to have croak-protection; particularly
one that wouldn't necessitate being at the console to use SYSRQ?
It seems that Linux has a looong-standing reputation
of behaving much badlier than BSDs in low-memory conditions;
is that bad reputation justified?
If so, what do BSDs do that make them behave better?
Could Linux evolve positively in that direction?
Is that already being done in 2.3.x?

Sorry for the silly questions...

[ "Faré" | VN: Уng-Vû Bân | Join the TUNES project! http://www.tunes.org/ ]
[ FR: François-René Rideau | TUNES is a Useful, Nevertheless Expedient System ]
[ Reflection&Cybernethics | Project for a Free Reflective Computing System ]
In a five year period we can get one superb programming language.
Only we can't control when the five year period will begin. -- Alan Perlis

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