Re: VM Problems in 2.6.7 (Too active OOM Killer)

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 05:17:01AM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> this is a well known 2.6 oom-killer problem w/o swap. Not the worst one,
> I mentioned the worst one here just a few weeks ago:
> 	http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl1518647992d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=fa.i50b3kk.p0qsjs%40ifi.uio.no
> the only fix at the moment is to use 2.4 with oom killer disabled (the
> same issue could happen with 2.4 too). even if it would work better than
> the above the oom killer will still get screwed by mlock and it simply
> cannot know how much lowmem is freeable leading to deadlock instead of
> -ENOMEM with syscalls if you fill the whole lowmem zone.
> I fixed everything related to oom in 2.4 some year back, now need to
> port to 2.6.
> workaround is to add swap in 2.6, but in some condition it'll still
> underpeform compared to 2.4 due the lack of the zone-reserve-ratio algo.

Can we try to get a bit more specific? I suspect the reason this stuff
isn't getting much traction is because it's too broad to correlate to
internal kernel problems or the userspace cases that trigger them. I
think once we get that kind of documentation/changelogging we should be
able to get the pieces in.


-- wli