Panic on OOM

[Chris Fowler <cfowler@outpostsentinel.com>]

I'm running into a problem in 2.6.38 where the kernel is not doing what
I'm expecting it to do.  I'm guessing that some things have changed and
that is what it going on.

First,  The tune at boot:

        f.open("/proc/sys/vm/panic_on_oom", std::ios::out);
        f << "1";
        f.close();

        f.open("/proc/sys/kernel/panic", std::ios::out);
        f << "10";
        f.close();

I want the kernel to panic on out of memory.  I then want it to wait 10s
before doing a reboot.

This program will consume all memory and make the box unresponsive

#!/usr/bin/perl

my @mem = ()
while(1) {
  push @mem, "########################";
}

It does not take long to fill up 1G of space.  There is NO swap on this
device and never will be.  I did notice that after a long period of time
(I've not timed it) I finally do see a panic and I do see "rebooting in
10 seconds..." .  It does not reboot.


I'm guessing that there are some tweaks or new behavior I just need to
be aware of.

Thanks,
Chris