Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Philipp Rumpf
2001-03-22T19:24:14Z

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 08:48:54PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Patrick O'Rourke wrote:
>
> > Since the system will panic if the init process is chosen by
> > the OOM killer, the following patch prevents select_bad_process()
> > from picking init.
>
> One question ... has the OOM killer ever selected init on
> anybody's system ?

Yes, I managed to reproduce this a while ago. (init was the only
process around though).

We don't ever kill init, fwiw; we panic(), which is the right thing
to do if init can't keep running.

> I think that the scoring algorithm should make sure that
> we never pick init, unless the system is screwed so badly
> that init is broken or the only process left ;)

I can't think of a situation where the OOM killer does the wrong thing.