OOM may be being too nice to killed processes

OOM may be being too nice to killed processes

[Adam Pennington]

I may be misunderstanding this, but looking at this portion of code from 
the oom task killer... Isn't it dangerous to give a process PF_MEMALLOC and 
then only pass it a SIGTERM? My take is that the high priority bump up 
should only happen for the force_sig(SIGKILL,p).

        /*
         * We give our sacrificial lamb high priority and access to
         * all the memory it needs. That way it should be able to
         * exit() and clear out its resources quickly...
         */
        p->counter = 5 * HZ;
        p->flags |= PF_MEMALLOC;

        /* This process has hardware access, be more careful. */
        if (cap_t(p->cap_effective) & CAP_TO_MASK(CAP_SYS_RAWIO)) {
                force_sig(SIGTERM, p);
        } else {
                force_sig(SIGKILL, p);
        }

Adam Pennington