From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:06:16 -0700 From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [patch -mm 5/5] oom: add sysctl to dump tasks memory state Message-Id: <20070926130616.f16446fd.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: David Rientjes Cc: andrea@suse.de, clameter@sgi.com, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 10:47:13 -0700 (PDT) David Rientjes wrote: > Adds a new sysctl, 'oom_dump_tasks', that dumps a list of all system tasks > (excluding kernel threads) and their pid, uid, tgid, vm size, rss cpu, > oom_adj score, and name. > > Helpful for determining why an OOM condition occurred and what rogue task > caused it. > > It is configurable so that large systems, such as those with several > thousand tasks, do not incur a performance penalty associated with data > they may not desire. > > There currently do not appear to be any other generic kernel callers that > dump all this information. Perhaps in the future it will be worthwhile > to construct a generic task dump interface based on passing a set of > flags that specify what per-task information shall be shown. It isn't obvious to me why this has "oom" in its name. It is just a general display-stuff-about-task-memory handler, isn't it? Nor is it obvious why we need it at all. This sort of information can already be gathered from /proc/pid/whatever. If the system is all wedged and you can't get console control then this info dump doesn't provide you with info which you're interested in anyway - you want to see the global (or per-cgroup) info, not the per-task info. -- 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-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org