On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Mike Belopuhov <mkb@crypt.org.ru> wrote:
quoted text
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 2:08 AM, Ted Unangst <ted.unangst@gmail.com> wrote:
>> So it's not a good idea to perform long lasting operations in the kernel.
>> The scheduler doesn't deal well with it and nobody else gets to run.
>>
>> One of those long loops is loading a large table into pf.  If you're
>> lucky, you'll run out of memory and pool will finally sleep.
>>
>
> hmm, but root can do other evil things.. or you're getting prepared for
> the future, when we'll have permissions for the tables? :-)

Even root is supposed to be subject to the scheduler.  Sure, you can
renice -20 and eat all the cpu, but a process at normal priority
levels should not.