From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263130AbUK0AF7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:05:59 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263064AbUK0AF1 (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:05:27 -0500 Received: from smtp206.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([216.136.129.96]:12983 "HELO smtp206.mail.sc5.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S262481AbUKZX5E (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Nov 2004 18:57:04 -0500 Message-ID: <41A7C2CA.1030008@yahoo.com.au> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 10:56:58 +1100 From: Nick Piggin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041007 Debian/1.7.3-5 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ralf Hildebrandt CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Out of memory, but no OOM Killer? (2.6.9-ac11) References: <20041126224722.GK30987@charite.de> In-Reply-To: <20041126224722.GK30987@charite.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Ralf Hildebrandt wrote: > rsync seems to want lots of memory, yet the OOM killer doesn't strike. > Subsequently, that machine died an ugly death until delivered by a > power-cycle. > > Why doesn't the OOM killer reap rsync? This could be the problem where fragmented memory causes atomic higher order allocations to fail, for which there is a fix in -mm, which should make its way into 2.6.11. Also, the increased atomic memory reserves in current 2.6-bk should alleviate the problem. As a temporary workaround, you can increase /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes BTW. what does `free` say when the allocation failures are happening?