From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Christian Bodmer" Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 19:32:29 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init Message-ID: <3ABA534D.2392.3D7585@localhost> References: <4605B269DB001E4299157DD1569079D2809930@EXCHANGE03.plaza.ds.adp.com> In-reply-to: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: I can't say I understand the whole MM system, however the random killing of processes seems like a rather unfortunate solution to the problem. If someone has a spare minute, maybe they could explain to me why running out of free memory in kswapd results in a deadlock situation. That aside, would it be an improvement to define another process flag (PF_OOMPRESERVE) that would declare a process as undesirable to be killed in an OOM situation, so that the user has at least some control over what gets killed first or last respectively. Only when select_bad_process() runs out of unflagged processes will it then proceed to kill the processes with this new flag. Just an idea, I am pretty sure there's tons of reasons why not to introduce a new per process flag. /Cheers Chris -- 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/