Re: [patch 5/7 -mm] oom: replace sysctls with quick mode

David Rientjes
2010-02-16T09:04:53Z

On Tue, 16 Feb 2010, KOSAKI Motohiro wrote:

> > > "_quick" is always bad sysctl name.
> >
> > Why? It does exactly what it says: it kills current without doing an
> > expensive tasklist scan and suppresses the possibly long tasklist dump.
> > That's the oom killer's "quick mode."
>
> Because, an administrator think "_quick" implies "please use it always".
> plus, "quick" doesn't describe clealy meanings. oom_dump_tasks does.
>

The audience for both of these tunables (now that oom_dump_tasks is
default to enabled) is users with extremely long tasklists that want to
avoid those scans, so oom_kill_quick implies that it won't waste any time
and will act how it's documented: simply kill current and move on.