On 22 Mar 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

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.

When something weird happens, it might be better to kill
init and have the machine reset itself after the panic
(echo 30 > /proc/sys/kernel/panic).

Killing all other things and leaving just init intact
makes for a machine which is as good as dead, without a
chance for recovery-by-reboot...

OTOH, I haven't heard of the OOM killer ever chosing init,
not even of people who tried creating these special kinds
of situations to trigger it on purpose.

regards,

Rik
--
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However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...

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