From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754986AbZENJ3b (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 May 2009 05:29:31 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754205AbZENJ3M (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 May 2009 05:29:12 -0400 Received: from atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz ([195.113.26.193]:58779 "EHLO atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753595AbZENJ3L (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 May 2009 05:29:11 -0400 Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 11:29:09 +0200 From: Pavel Machek To: Christoph Lameter Cc: David Rientjes , Andrew Morton , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Nick Piggin , Mel Gorman , Peter Ziljstra , Dave Hansen , San Mehat , Arve Hj?nnev?g , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Misleading OOM messages Message-ID: <20090514092909.GG1365@ucw.cz> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi! > While we are at it: Could we get rid of the name "Out of Memory" and stop > printing texts to that effect? What we call an OOM is a failure to > perform memory reclaim or we are running out of reserves due > to not being able to run reclaim. Mostly this is due to OS internal issues > having nothing to do actual amounts of memory available. It can be 'low on memory' if you play with mlock() a bit. It is out of memory if you run out of swap (or have no swap to begin with). I believe message is often correct. What message would you suggest? Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html