Memory and Paging

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 13:26 -0700, John Hubbard wrote:
> 1) Have a process running that 'owns' a certain amount of memory (enough 
> to run bash/top/kill/pidof and a few other small programs) and keeps 
> this memory from being paged out. 
> 2) Enough memory set aside for SSHD to allow a new connection. 
> 3) Some way to ssh in and access that memory owning process or request 
> memory from that process. 
> 
> Is there any way to do these things? 

You want to look into /etc/security/limits.conf which belongs to the
package libpam-modules. There you can limit the memory that is available
to a user to some value that is less than the available memory. Same for
other parameters like cpu usage. See, in particular, here:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/Linux-PAM-html/sag-pam_limits.html
But also check out the root of the document:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/Linux-PAM-html/Linux-PAM_SAG.html