Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Christian Bodmer
2001-03-22T18:32:29Z

I can't say I understand the whole MM system, however the random killing of
processes seems like a rather unfortunate solution to the problem. If someone
has a spare minute, maybe they could explain to me why running out of free
memory in kswapd results in a deadlock situation.

That aside, would it be an improvement to define another process flag
(PF_OOMPRESERVE) that would declare a process as undesirable to be killed in an
OOM situation, so that the user has at least some control over what gets killed
first or last respectively. Only when select_bad_process() runs out of
unflagged processes will it then proceed to kill the processes with this new
flag.

Just an idea, I am pretty sure there's tons of reasons why not to introduce a
new per process flag.

/Cheers
Chris