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Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 13:12:08 +0000
To: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
From: Jonathan Morton <chromi@cyberspace.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init
Cc: Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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>I thought of some things which could break it, which I want to try and deal
>with before releasing a patch.  Specifically, I want to make freepages.min
>sacrosanct, so that malloc() *never* tries to use it.  This should be
>fairly easy to implement - simply subtract freepages.min from the freemem
>part.  An even nicer way would be to subtract freepages.low (or some
>similar value) instead of freepages.min for non-root or non-privileged
>processes.

Hmm, interesting.  Even with my modification - which means that
vm_enough_memory() will always return false if the allocation would clobber
freepages.min - I can still trigger OOM quite easily.  Even with no swap on
my box, there's a lot of disk activity, probably due to there being
virtually no disk cache left - could the generation of disk buffer and
cache pages be bypassing vm_enough_memory()?  If so, would using
freepages.low as the threshold rather than freepages.min help at all? (or
have I got everything muddled...)

--------------------------------------------------------------
from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail:     chromi@cyberspace.org  (not for attachments)
big-mail: chromatix@penguinpowered.com
uni-mail: j.d.morton@lancaster.ac.uk

The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.

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