Re: OOM notifications

Jan Kara
2007-10-30T14:57:30Z

Hello,

> 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.
Actually, wouldn't a generic netlink interface be more elegant? Then
we could connect it with DBUS and it would be much easier for
applications (Desktop) to handle such events.
I agree that near-to-oom conditions are quite volatile and maybe we
want a technically simple (and thus more reliable) mechanism for the
notification but I anyway wanted to point to this possibility.

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SuSE CR Labs