Re: oom killer gone nuts

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 02:15:56PM +0100, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 01:34:06PM +0100, Jens Axboe wrote:
> 
> > Using current BK on my x86-64 workstation, it went completely nuts today
> > killing tasks left and right with oodles of free memory available.
> 
> Yes, the fact that the oom-killer exists is a serious problem.
> People work on trying to tune it, instead of just removing it.

I'm working on fixing it, not just tuning it. The bugs in mainline
aren't about the selection algorithm (which is normally what people
calls oom killer). The bugs in mainline are about being able to kill a
task reliably, regardless of which task we pick, and every linux kernel
out there has always killed some task when it was oom. So the bugs are
just obvious regressions of 2.6 if compared to 2.4.

But this is all fixed now, I'm starting sending the first patches to
Anderw very shortly (last week there was still the oracle stuff going
on). Now I can fix the rejects.

I will guarantee nothing about which task will be picked (that's the old
code at works, I changed not a bit in what normally people calls "the oom
killer", plus the recent improvement from Thomas), but I guarantee the
VM won't kill tasks right and left like it does now (i.e. by invoking the
oom killer multiple times).