Re: OOM killer firing on 2.6.18 and later during LTP runs

[Andrew Morton <akpm@google.com>]

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:35:40 -0800
"Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@mbligh.org> wrote:

> > The traces are a bit confusing, but I don't actually see anything wrong
> > there.  The machine has used up all swap, has used up all memory and has
> > correctly gone and killed things.  After that, there's free memory again.
> 
> Yeah, it's just a bit odd that it's always in the IO path.

It's not.  It's in the main pagecache allocation path for reads.

> Makes me
> suspect there's actually a bunch of pagecache in the box as well,

show_free_areas() doesn't appear to dump the information which is needed to
work out how much of that memory is pagecache and how much is swapcache.  I
assume it's basically all swapcache.

> but
> maybe it's just coincidence, and the rest of the box really is full
> of anon mem. I thought we dumped the alt-sysrq-m type stuff on an OOM
> kill, but it seems not. maybe that's just not in mainline.

We do.  It's sitting there in your logs.