Re: Protecting processes from the OOM killer

Alan Cox
2003-03-03T15:09:14Z

On Mon, 2003-03-03 at 14:45, Jesse Pollard wrote:
> Shouldn't - the process the user tries to run will not be started since
> it must reserve the space first. malloc will fail immediately, allowing the
> process to handle the even gracefully and exit.
>
> Anything else is a bug in the application.

The one case you can't cover cleanly in C is a stack grow exceeding memory
usage. At that point it requires a tiny bit of magic. You can do it, but
the overcommit blocker has to armwave a little for the kernel and other
things so I've never seen it happen in a normal situation