> On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:57:20 +0100
> Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > > AIX contains the SIGDANGER signal to notify applications to free up some
> > > unused cached memory:
> > >
> > >
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0007.0/0901.html
> > >
> > > There have been a few discussions on implementing such an idea on Linux,
> > > but nothing concrete has been achieved.
> > >
> > > On the kernel side Rik suggested two notification points: "about to
> > > swap" (for desktop scenarios) and "about to OOM" (for embedded-like
> > > scenarios).
> > >
> > > With that assumption in mind it would be necessary to either have two
> > > special devices for notification, or somehow indicate both events
> > > through the same file descriptor.
> > Actually, wouldn't a generic netlink interface be more elegant? Then
> > we could connect it with DBUS and it would be much easier for
> > applications (Desktop) to handle such events.
> > I agree that near-to-oom conditions are quite volatile and maybe we
> > want a technically simple (and thus more reliable) mechanism for the
> > notification but I anyway wanted to point to this possibility.
>
> There's nothing wrong with being able to get this info via DBUS,
> but we cannot expect every database and JVM out there (big targets
> for the "reduce your memory footprint" thing on servers) to grow
> a DBUS interface.
