Re: [RFC] Enabling other oom schemes

[Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com>]

Robert Love wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 13:48, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> 
> 
>>Also, when the OOM condition is triggered I'd like the system to
>>reboot, but first try for a short while to unmount filesystems cleanly.
>>
>>Any chance of those things?

<snip>

> I do like all of this, however, and want to see some different OOM
> killers.


One thing that we've done, and that others may find useful, is to allow 
processes to become immune to the oom-killer as long as they stay under 
a certain amount of memory allocated.

We added a syscall that specifies a certain number of pages of memory. 
As long as the process' memory utilization remains under that amount, 
the oom-killer will not kill it.

In our case we are on a mostly-embedded system, and have a pretty good 
idea what will be running.  This lets us engineer the critical apps to 
be immune, while still allowing memory to be freed up by killing 
non-critical applications.

Chris


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