The
DOOM system administration tool was written by a
bored hacker at university of New Mexico, as a patch to the open-source DOOM engine. Each
monster represents a running
process, with the
PID and
name floating over his head. If a monster is wounded, the corresponding process is
reniced, and if the monster dies, the process is killed. In the
DOOM process manager, processes/monsters can defend themselves against the
sysadmin, which makes killing processes more interesting than a quick
kill -9.
In crowded systems, processes tend to start
killing each other at random (the AI in DOOM
isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer). Consider it process darwinism. The strong daemons survive to
spawn child processes, and the weak perish and go to the
bit bucket. Just hope that your
X server is tougher than that rogue
netscape process that's slowly devouring your free memory.
The code and a thorough explanation are posted at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/