OOM notifications

Marcelo Tosatti
2007-10-18T20:15:38Z

Hi,

AIX contains the SIGDANGER signal to notify applications to free up some
unused cached memory:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0007.0/0901.html

There have been a few discussions on implementing such an idea on Linux,
but nothing concrete has been achieved.

On the kernel side Rik suggested two notification points: "about to
swap" (for desktop scenarios) and "about to OOM" (for embedded-like
scenarios).

With that assumption in mind it would be necessary to either have two
special devices for notification, or somehow indicate both events
through the same file descriptor.

Comments are more than welcome.