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Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 02:54:55 -0300 (BRST)
From: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
To: Szabolcs Szakacsits <szaka@f-secure.com>
Cc: "Patrick O'Rourke" <orourke@missioncriticallinux.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init
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On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:

> When I ported your OOM killer to 2.2.x and integrated it into the
> 'reserved root memory' [*] patch, during intensive testing I found two
> cases when init was killed. It happened on low-end machines and when
> OOM killer wasn't triggered so init was killed in the page fault
> handler. The later was also one of the reasons I replaced the "random"
> OOM killer in page fault handler with yours [so there is only one OOM
> killer].

Good idea, we should do this for 2.4.  I cannot remember
reading an email from you about this, it's quite possible
I just missed it and didn't answer because I never read
it ...

> Other things that bothered me,
>  - niced processes are penalized

This can be considered a bug and should be fixed...

>  - trying to kill a task that is permanently in TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE
>    will probably deadlock the machine [or the random OOM killer will
>    kill the box].

This could indeed be a problem, though I cannot really see any
case where a task would be in TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE permanently.
OTOH, a 1GB read() will take a (much) too long time to finish.

Your ideas sound really good, would you have the time to implement
them for 2.4 ?

regards,

Rik
--
Virtual memory is like a game you can't win;
However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...

		http://www.surriel.com/
http://www.conectiva.com/	http://distro.conectiva.com.br/

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