[olpc-software] graceful handling of out-of-memory conditions

[Joshua N Pritikin]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 09:36:07PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Of course, down the road we may add further things like instrumenting
> apps to deal with SIGDANGER or whatever signals from the kernel, save
> their session and automatically exit, cooperate with our WM, restore
> from hibernation etc. 
> 
> > And session management of some sort, whether built into a window manager
> > or separate, is what I'm referring to as a general concept of
> > understanding what the set of applications the user is using right now,
> > whether they are instantiated in runnable processes or not.
> > Maybe I should have used a less loaded term.
> 
> Yea, I'm not sure X11 session management is particularly relevant these
> days but I could be wrong? Or maybe it's just the GNOME session manager
> that have done nothing but get in my way :-)

Dunno, session management seems like the place where this should go.
Any application which isn't in the foreground could be the next
candidate for OOM death.  Hence, whenever launching a new app or
changing the window stacking order -- in essence, whenever the fg
application will no longer be in the fg -- the window manager can send
it a "save session" message.

Is this feasible?

How much resource is typically consumed by saving the session?

For abiword, it could create a restore file for open documents.
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