Re: [oom]: [0/4] fix OOM deadlock running OAST

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 04:38:19PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > I don't think it _is_ relevant.  Wev'e scanned the crap out of all the
> > eligible zones, found nothing swappable outable or otherwise reclaimable. 
> > That's as good a definition of oom as you're likely to get.  It takes care
> > of mlocked user memory too.
> 
> The actual net effect of all this is blowing away if (nr_swap_pages > 0)
> for __GFP_WIRED allocations. Removing those 2 lines (and the one line of
> whitespace next to it) will pass the test I observed failure in.

OK.

> It's a
> judgment call as to whether it's beneficial in general, as it does
> insulate userspace somewhat from needing to wait for slow IO being the
> ostensible cause of the allocation failure.

mm...  I can only see that happening if the IO system is retiring write
requests at much less than 10/sec, which seems unlikely.  Still, that can
be tuned around.

> RedHat vendor kernels have removed the check entirely

When telling us this sort of thing, please always specify the kernel version.

I assume you're referring to a 2.6 kernel?  If so, some thwapping might be
in order.