Re: Andrea VM changes

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 02:01:35AM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Aug 2003, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> 
> > Suppose you have a big fat hog leaking (lets say, netscape) allocating
> > pages at a slow pace. Now you have a decent well behaved app who is
> > allocating at a fast pace, and gets killed.
> > 
> > The chance the well behaved app gets killed is big, right? 
> 
> Usually syslogd, which receives an error message from the
> network driver the moment memory fills up.
> 
> The near-certain death of syslogd in OOM situations is why
> I wrote the OOM killer in the first place.

that was used to happen with the old vm, now the fariness in the
allocator is better and normally the first task that runs in the oom
condition is the one that's killed, plus after one task-killing no other
tasks are normally killed (in the past the vm wasn't capable of using
the freed ram promptly and it was killing 3/4 tasks in a row, so syslogd
was killed despite the hog already exited). still you're right syslogd
may be very well still killed in theory but that's ok with me.

Andrea