Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

James A. Sutherland
2001-03-22T22:17:09Z

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Patrick O'Rourke wrote:
>
> > Since the system will panic if the init process is chosen by
> > the OOM killer, the following patch prevents select_bad_process()
> > from picking init.
>
> One question ... has the OOM killer ever selected init on
> anybody's system ?

Well, I managed to get the OOM killer killing init once; OTOH, I had just
broken MM completely (disabled freeing of pages entirely!) so that doesn't
really count, I think :-)

> I think that the scoring algorithm should make sure that
> we never pick init, unless the system is screwed so badly
> that init is broken or the only process left ;)

If the system is that badly screwed, killing init is probably the right
thing to do, since this should then cause a panic, and thus a reboot if
the machine is so configured?

James.