Re: OOM notifications

Chris Friesen
2007-10-19T05:16:16Z

Ulrich Drepper wrote:

> I agree. Applications shouldn't be expected to be yet more complicated
> and have different levels of low memory handling. You might want to
> give a process a second shot at handling SIGDANGER but after that's it's
> all about preparation for a shutdown.

I disagree. From an embedded viewpoint it would be nice to have a
"please free up memory", then a "we really need memory NOW", then
finally the kernel oom killer.

The advantage of the middle message is that it allows userspace to do
smarter things if it wants to (for instance, if there is an overall
system manager or some such thing, it could do a better job of
restarting tasks than the kernel oom killer since it knows the relative
importance of tasks).

Chris