Rik van Riel [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Patrick O'Rourke wrote:

quoted

Since the system will panic if the init process is chosen by
the OOM killer, the following patch prevents select_bad_process()
from picking init.

One question ... has the OOM killer ever selected init on
anybody's system ?

I think that the scoring algorithm should make sure that
we never pick init, unless the system is screwed so badly
that init is broken or the only process left ;)

Is there ever a case where killing init is the right thing to do?
My impression is that if init is selected the whole machine dies.
If you can kill init and still have a machine that mostly works,
then I guess it makes some sense not to kill it.

Guaranteeing not to select init can buy you piece of mind because
init if properly setup can put the machine back together again, while
not special casing init means something weird might happen and init
would be selected.

Eric
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