From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 13 15: 0:27 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail.netbsd.org (redmail.netbsd.org [155.53.200.193]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 976F414CCF for ; Tue, 13 Jul 1999 15:00:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cgd@netbsd.org) Received: (qmail 4397 invoked by uid 1000); 13 Jul 1999 21:58:54 -0000 To: Matthew Dillon Cc: Jason Thorpe , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, tech-userlevel@netbsd.org Subject: Re: Replacement for grep(1) (part 2) References: <199907132130.OAA24167@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> <199907132138.OAA81030@apollo.backplane.com> From: cgd@netbsd.org (Chris G. Demetriou) Date: 13 Jul 1999 14:58:54 -0700 In-Reply-To: Matthew Dillon's message of Tue, 13 Jul 1999 14:38:58 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <87673oyzxd.fsf@redmail.redback.com> Lines: 33 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.2 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Matthew Dillon writes: > Fine... you have ultimate design control over every process running on > the system. Simply set appropriate resource limits for the processes > run by the system and you are done. For some value of ultimate control. Reality these days is that if you want an embedded system based on UNIX that both doesn't suck and that has the features you need, you have to take _some_ off the shelf software components, glue them together as simply as possible, and do what you can to squeeze realiability out of them. There are many ways to squeeze reliability, with respect to memory consumption. One of them is hand-tuning resource limits for the applications, as you mention (and as I suggested in a previous e-mail). However, this can be difficult to get right (but there's a safety margin), or, for some applications, impossible to do reasonably at all. You can attempt to deny it, but another valuable one is being able to detect without panic or without processes being killed that the system is out of memory, and the most sane way of doing that is with resource preallocation. Yes, it's conservative, but there's no reliable alternative that i'm aware of. cgd -- Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message