Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Doug Ledford
2001-03-24T18:15:13Z

Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
> On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, Doug Ledford wrote:
> > To those people that would suggest I send in code I only have this to say.
> > Fine, I'll send in a patch to fix this bug. It will make the oom killer call
> > the cache reclaim functions and never kill anything. That would at least fix
> > the bug you see above.
>
> That won't fix the problem, but merely paper it over. The problem is
> in the balancing code that lets swap be exausted while at the same time
> allowing cache to become obscenely obese in the first place. I can't
> trigger that behavior here, but it obviously exists for some workloads.

I would be more than happy to fix the problem properly if I knew the first
thing about the vm subsystem, but I don't.

> General thread comment:
> To those who are griping, and obviously rightfully so, Rik has twice
> stated on this list that he could use some help with VM auto-balancing.
> The responses (visible on this list at least) was rather underwhelming.
> I noted no public exchange of ideas.. nada in fact.

While my post didn't give an exact formula, I was quite clear on the fact that
the system is allowing the caches to overrun memory and cause oom problems.
I'm more than happy to test patches, and I would even be willing to suggest
some algorithms that might help, but I don't know where to stick them in the
code. Most of the people who have been griping are in a similar position.

> Get off your lazy butts and do something about it. Don't work on the
> oom-killer though.. that's only a symptom. Work on the problem instead.
>
> -Mike (who doesn't give a rats ass if he gets flamed;-)
>
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Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com> http://people.redhat.com/dledford
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