additional oom-killer tuneable worth submitting?

Chris Friesen
2006-12-07T18:31:20Z

The kernel currently has a way to adjust the oom-killer score via
/proc/<pid>/oomadj.

However, to adjust this effectively requires knowledge of the scores of
all the other processes on the system.

I'd like to float an idea (which we've implemented and been using for
some time) where the semantics are slightly different:

We add a new "oom_thresh" member to the task struct.
We introduce a new proc entry "/proc/<pid>/oomthresh" to control it.

The "oom-thresh" value maps to the max expected memory consumption for
that process. As long as a process uses less memory than the specified
threshold, then it is immune to the oom-killer.

On an embedded platform this allows the designer to engineer the system
and protect critical apps based on their expected memory consumption.
If one of those apps goes crazy and starts chewing additional memory
then it becomes vulnerable to the oom killer while the other apps remain
protected.

If a patch for the above feature was submitted, would there be any
chance of getting it included? Maybe controlled by a config option?

Chris