From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 00:25:20 +0200 From: Andrea Arcangeli Subject: Re: [PATCH] VM fix for 2.4.0-test9 & OOM handler Message-ID: <20001010002520.B8709@athlon.random> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: ; from peterw@dascom.com.au on Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 07:10:13AM +1000 Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Peter Waltenberg Cc: Ingo Molnar , MM mailing list , Byron Stanoszek , Rik van Riel , Linus Torvalds List-ID: On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 07:10:13AM +1000, Peter Waltenberg wrote: > People seem to be forgetting (again), that Rik's code is *REALLY* an Please explain why you think "people" is forgetting that. At least from my part I wasn't forgetting that and so far I didn't read any email that made me to think others are forgetting that. > It's probably reasonable to not kill init, but the rest just don't matter. Killing init is a kernel bug. > Without the OOM killer the machine would have locked up and you'd lose that 3 Grab 2.2.18pre15aa1 and try to lockup the machine if you can. > At least with Rik's code you end up with a usable machine afterwards which is > a major improvement. If current 2.4.x lockups during OOM that's because of bugs introduced during 2.[34].x. The oom killer is completly irrelevant to the stability of the kernel, the oom killer only deals with the _selection_ of the task to kill. OOM detection is a completly orthogonal issue. If something the oom killer can introduce a lockup condition if there isn't a mechamism to fallback killing the current task (all the other tasks may be sleeping on a down-nfs-server in interruptible mode). Andrea -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/