On Mon, 16 Mar 2020 11:56:29 +0100
Bernhard Voelker
On 2020-03-15 23:17, Dave Howorth wrote:
I think you've missed Richmond's point. Switching to an existing shell still takes many minutes in such a situation. He's suggesting a new mechanism that allows such a thing, or creation of a new shell as well, even when memory is overloaded.
If switching alone is already taking too long, how could creating of a new shell plus switching to it be lighter for an overloaded system? It seems I really missed something.
Yes, you missed that the kernel would simply stop/pause processing pretty much everything else in order to give priority to the emergency shell, as Carlos has pointed out. The problem is that something is grabbing too many resources. Unlike the real world, we can simply stop the world inside the computer so we can examine its state and fix whatever is emitting too much CO2 or whatever the problem is. PS please don't send me a private copy of emails. I am subscribed to the list.
Re. MagicSysRq: you can kill processes, sync, umount and reboot, but in the long run, I think there's no way around getting more RAM to have more fun.
It seems that setting up a service unit to start a root shell on a VT as the system starts and giving it high priority with nice might come close to meeting Richmond's requirements.
Have a nice day, Berny
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