Subject: Re: Is writing to om_adj important ?
From: Declan Mullen <declan@jadplace.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:21:13 +1100

Hi

I've just read the kernel documentation for "oom_adj" 
(filesytems/proc.txt) :

  2.12 /proc/<pid>/oom_adj - Adjust the oom-killer score
  ------------------------------------------------------
  This file can be used to adjust the score used to select which processes
  should be killed in an  out-of-memory  situation.  Giving it a high 
score will
  increase the likelihood of this process being killed by the 
oom-killer.  Valid
  values are in the range -16 to +15, plus the special value -17, which 
disables
  oom-killing altogether for this process.

So I think I can ignore these errors.

All the best,
Declan


Declan Mullen wrote:
> Hi
>
> When I ssh into my Linux server, the login succeeds but I notice that 
> I get the following type of entry appended to the auth.log :
>
>    Jan 26 17:10:45 maxv1 sshd[32624]: error writing 
> /proc/self/oom_adj: Permission denied
>
> What are the implications of the sshd not being able to write to the 
> oom_adj ? Ie Is this error significant or should I just ignore it ?
>
> The sshd's write is failing because the server I'm logging into is a 
> VServer guest/virtual server, and the VServer virtualisation 
> technology places restrictions on what can be written to the /proc 
> filesystem from within the guest.
>
> The guest server OS is Debian Lenny and the sshd versions is 
> "1:5.1p1-5". Within the sshd_config Privilege Separation is turned on.
>
> The host server's kernel is Lenny's "linux-source-2.6.26" (version 
> "2.6.26-13") with Lenny's vserver patches applied from 
> "linux-patch-debian-2.6.26" (version "2.6.26-13"). The host's 
> util-vserver package is version "0.30.216~r2772-6". The host's
> "vserver-debiantools" package is version "0.6.3".
>
> Many thanks,
> Declan
>
>
>
>
>