Re: [PATCH] a simple OOM killer to save me from Netscape

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br> writes:
> 
> 1) you DO need to check to see if the system still has enough
>    free pages
> 2) the cache size may be better expressed as some percentage
>    of system memory ... it's still not good, but the 3 MB you
>    chose is probably completely wrong for 90% of the systems
>    out there ;)
> 
> I believe Andrew Morton was also looking at making changes to the
> out_of_memory() function, but only to make sure the OOM killer
> isn't started to SOON. I guess we can work something out that will
> both kill soon enough *and* not too soon  ;)
> 
> Any suggestions for making Slats' ideas more generic so they work
> on every system ?

Well I don't see how thrashing is necessarily connected to oom
at all.  You could have Gigs of swap not even touched and still
thrash.  

I would suggest adding a user space app to kill ill behaved processes.
It can do all kinds of things like put netscape on it's hit list, have
a config file etc.  But with a mlocked user space app killing ill behaved
processes, we can worry less about a kernel oom.  (Yes the user space
app would need to be static and probably not depend on glibc at all
since it is such a pig, but that shouldn't be a real issue).

The kernel should always wait until it is certain we are out of
memory.  This should give a user space app plenty of time to react.


Eric
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