Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Rik van Riel
2001-03-22T16:19:37Z

On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Guest section DW wrote:

> > One question ... has the OOM killer ever selected init on
> > anybody's system ?
>
> Last week I installed SuSE 7.1 somewhere.
> During the install: "VM: killing process rpm",
> leaving the installer rather confused.
> (An empty machine, 256MB, 144MB swap, I think 2.2.18.)

That's the 2.2 kernel ...

> Last month I had a computer algebra process running for a week.
> Killed. But this computation was the only task this machine had.
> Its sole reason of existence.
> Too bad - zero information out of a week's computation.
> (I think 2.4.0.)
>
> Clearly, Linux cannot be reliable if any process can be killed
> at any moment. I am not happy at all with my recent experiences.

Note that the OOM killer in 2.4 won't kick in until your machine
is out of both memory and swap, see mm/oom_kill.c::out_of_memory().

regards,

Rik
--
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However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...

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