Straw man of user space unable to cope with errors
Straw man of user space unable to cope with errors
Posted Mar 12, 2015 10:01 UTC (Thu) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655)In reply to: Straw man of user space unable to cope with errors by tao
Parent article: Allowing small allocations to fail
Please no signal. Handling ENOMEM in multithreaded daemons is often a simple case of aborting or failing a single request (and thus also freeing up resources in the daemon itself, often releasing things like filedescriptors and the like as well). A signal would not confer any specificity about what caused it.
Sure normal programs should be allowed to be killed, but you'd pretty soon end up with a situation that all daemons would block this flag (since they can't really handle it gracefully). And on servers that effectively everything running (that really take up resources).
The only benefit would be if such a signal could be used to release all internal buffers, but that is often a problem that needs temporary resources and often needs to wait for other threads/processes to enter a quiescent state (and that possibly keep claiming resources until then). So that would only work before you have a problem.