Re: [PATCH] fix spurious OOM kills

Marcelo Tosatti
2004-11-19T13:41:10Z

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 04:08:24PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Martin MOKREJ__ <mmokrejs@ribosome.natur.cuni.cz> wrote:
> >
> > Anyway, plain 2.6.7 kills only the application asking for
> > so much memory and logs via syslog:
> > Out of Memory: Killed process 58888 (RNAsubopt)
> >
> > It's a lot better compared to what we have in 2.6.10-rc2,
> > from my user's view.
>
> We haven't made any changes to the oom-killer algorithm since July 2003.
> Weird.

As Thomas Gleixner has investigated, the OOM killer selection is problematic.

When testing your ignore-page-referenced patch it first killed the memory hog
then shortly afterwards the shell I was running it on.

You've seen Thomas emails, he has nice description there.