Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Paul Jakma
2001-03-24T02:00:29Z

On Sat, 24 Mar 2001 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:

> No, ulimit does not work. (But it helps a little.)

no, not perfect, i very much agree. but in daily usage it reduces
chance of OOM to close to 0.

> No, /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory does not work.

that's because it disables the very rough resource checking that
linux has. it makes OOM even easier to achieve:

mm/mmap.c::vm_enough_memory():

/* Sometimes we want to use more memory than we have. */
if (sysctl_overcommit_memory)
return 1;

it doesn't make linux go into a 'non-overcommit' mode, cause linux
does not have the accounting to cover it...

solution according to more knowledgable folks than i, sysadmin, is
better accounting so that vm_enough_memory can be more accurate
rather than developing an all-seeing oom_killer().

> Andries

regards,
--
Paul Jakma paul@clubi.ie paul@jakma.org
PGP5 key: http://www.clubi.ie/jakma/publickey.txt
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