Re: Runaway process and oom-killer

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 09:10:33AM -0600, Chris Friesen wrote:
> Helge Hafting wrote:
> 
> >My guess:
> >Something needs memory but finds there is none to be had
> >oom-killer is invoked and targets myapp.
> >myapp takes some time to die. Particularly, the memory it uses
> >isn't freed up instantly.
> 
> Has anyone considered actually bumping up the priority of the task being 
> killed so that it gets to run and free up its resources in a timely manner?
> 
> We've done some experimenting with actually putting it in SCHED_RR and 
> it seems to help (in the case of other busy SCHED_RR tasks on the 
> system).  Admittedly we have an older kernel, so behaviour may be 
> different now.

Replacing the timeslice boost with sched-rr would probably be an ok
cleanup, but I'm unsure if it risks to break the other RT tasks
(especially when folks misuse a soft-RT design to do hard-RT work,
with userland drivers running with RT privilege mapping iommu
regions).

Most cpus goes idle as soon as the oom killer is entered so it
probably doesn't make much difference anyway. I didn't remove the
timeslice hack just because there wasn't any compelling reason to
remove it but it's probably not making much difference.