Re: [PATCH] fix spurious OOM kills

Marcelo Tosatti
2004-11-14T09:44:17Z

On Sun, Nov 14, 2004 at 12:37:40AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 05:52:21PM +0100, Chris Ross wrote:
> >
> >
> > Chris Ross escreveu:
> > >It seems good.
> >
> > Sorry Marcelo, I spoke to soon. The oom killer still goes haywire even
> > with your new patch. I even got this one whilst the machine was booting!
>
> On monday I'll make a patch to place the oom killer at the right place.
>
> Marcelo's argument that kswapd is a localized place isn't sound to me,
> kswapd is still racing against all other task contexts, so if the task
> context isn't reliable, there's no reason why kswapd should be more
> reliable than the task context. the trick is to check the _right_
> watermarks before invoking the oom killer, it's not about racing against
> each other, 2.6 is buggy in not checking the watermarks. Moving the oom
> killer in kswapd can only make thing worse, fix is simple, and it's the
> opposite thing: move the oom killer up the stack outside vmscan.c.

Its hard to detect OOM situation with zone->all_unreclaimable logic.

Well, I'll wait for your correct and definitive approach.