Re: OOM killer???

Andreas Rogge
2001-03-27T21:14:57Z

--On Tuesday, March 27, 2001 12:55:50 -0700 Andreas Dilger
<adilger@turbolinux.com> wrote:

> Every time this subject comes up, I point to AIX and SIGDANGER - a signal
> sent to processes when the system gets OOM. If the process has registered
> a SIGDANGER handler, it has a chance to free cache and such (or do a clean
> shutdown), otherwise the default signal handler will kill the process.

Having a SIGDANGER would be a fine thing, but this will need patching in all
current daemons and there has to be a possibility to configure the behaviour
of the process when recieving a SIGDANGER. i.e. it is a good idea to kill
apache on a workstation, but a very bad idea to kill apache on a webserver.
Generally I'd like to see such an implementation, but wouldn't it be better
to have a pre-seclction of the processes getting SIGDANGER?

For example: if OOM occours, send SIGDANGER to all non-root-processes with a
nice-level of n or higher (where n should be discussed).

This would make it easy to "configure" SIGDANGER-unaware Applications - in
the meantime, until all applications are SIGDANGER-aware - to deal with
OOM-situations. You just do an "nice -n -1 httpd" and one's httpd won't
get killed when OOM occours.

IMO this would dramatically improve the OOM-Problems right now.

--
Andreas Rogge <lu01@rogge.yi.org>
Available on IRCnet:#linux.de as Dyson