From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 22:06:02 +0200 (CEST) From: Ingo Molnar Reply-To: mingo@elte.hu Subject: Re: [PATCH] VM fix for 2.4.0-test9 & OOM handler In-Reply-To: <20001009214214.G19583@athlon.random> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: Rik van Riel , Byron Stanoszek , Linus Torvalds , MM mailing list , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > No. It's only needed if your OOM algorithm is so crappy that > > it might end up killing init by mistake. > > The algorithm you posted on the list in this thread will kill init if > on 4Mbyte machine without swap init is large 3 Mbytes and you execute > a task that grows over 1M. i think the OOM algorithm should not kill processes that have child-processes, it should first kill child-less 'leaves'. Killing a process that has child processes likely results in unexpected behavior of those child-processes. (and equals to effective killing of those child-processes as well.) But this mechanizm can be abused (a malicious memory hog can create a child-process just to avoid the OOM-killer) - but there are ways to avoid this, eg. to add all the 'MM badness' points to children? Ie. a child which has MM-abuser parent(s) will definitely be killed first. Ingo -- 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/