Re: [PATCH] oom_pardon, aka don't kill my xlock

Jon Masters
2004-09-27T12:17:26Z

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:00:56 +0200, Thomas Habets <thomas@habets.pp.se> wrote:
> > What we need is a mechanism to have a giant brainstraw emerge from the
> > front casing of the machine and suck the brains out of the guy running
> > a server with overcommit issues.
>
> So the way to deal with OOM-killer issues is to laugh at people who encounter
> it? How very openbsd of you.

Actually I was leaning towards non-overcommit as an approach if you're
that worried (I know user non-overcommit is not a perfect solution). I
like Andrea's patch but this is one of these circular issues that'll
keep popping up from time to time because there isn't a perfect
solution that works for everyone all of the time. I typically find oom
results in things I want dying underneath me. Windows does something
with extending its paging file when this happens - has anyone looked
at weird alternatives such as this for desktop Linux?

> And I don't run X or xlock on any of my servers. IOW: this was not a server.

Yes ok. I was picking at the OOM Killer rather than at you - you just
didn't get my sense of humour but that's ok.

Jon.