From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 01:55:35 -0800 (PST) From: David Rientjes Subject: Re: [PATCH 11 of 11] not-wait-memdie In-Reply-To: <504e981185254a12282d.1199326157@v2.random> Message-ID: References: <504e981185254a12282d.1199326157@v2.random> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, Andrew Morton List-ID: On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > Don't wait tif-memdie tasks forever because they may be stuck in some kernel > lock owned by some task that requires memory to exit the critical section. > This increases the possibility that tasks will be needlessly killed in OOM conditions. While the indefinite timeout is definitely not the ideal solution, it does have the advantage of preventing unnecessary kills. The OOM synchronization is good, but it's not _that_ good: it doesn't ensure that the OOM killed task has fully exited before another invocation of the OOM killer happens. So I think we're moving in a direction of requiring OOM killer timeouts and the only plausible way to do that is on a per-task level. It would require another unsigned long addition to struct task_struct but would completely fix OOM killer deadlocks. David -- 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