Re: Shutdown - 25 Years Later

On 28/04/2025 20:18, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> writes:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>

Fair enough. As long as those solutions work..

>
Or you could, you know, simply configure your kernel to say “no,
sorry, there’s not enough RAM for that”.

>
The whole idea of *not* doing that - pretending that resources are
infinite and arbitrarily murdering on the sly to maintain the fiction
- is utterly baffling to me. I'm curious what the rationale is behind
it.

 The choice is between memory allocation failing (generally leading to
processes existing or not even starting in the first place) when there
is plenty left due to pessimistic book-keeping, or killing processes
only when you genuinely run out of memory.
 The default is overcommit (i.e. the latter). It’s just a default, so if
you don’t like it, you can disable it.
 

*You* can Richard. Most of the rest of us wouldn't know where to start :-)
--
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels