Re: User space out of memory approach

Thomas Gleixner
2005-01-11T20:58:01Z

On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 16:46 -0400, Ilias Biris wrote:
> well looking into Alan's email again I think I answered thinking on
> the wrong side :-) that the suggestion was to switch off OOM
> altogether and be done with all the discussion... tsk tsk tsk too
> defensive and hasty I guess :-)
>
> Thinking it in another way alan's email could have the dimension of
> switching off overcommitment (and thus OOM) whilst in the user-space
> ranking stage to avoid reentrancy and invocation of oom again and
> again before killing something. It also solves the issue of using
> timed/counted resources which is plain ugly and evil. It would though
> be necessary to switch OOM back on when the OOMK has finally done the
> kill.
>
> Did I get it right this time Alan?

I don't get it at all.

Fixes for wrong invocation, reentrancy avoidance, removal of the ugly
and evil timer,counter hacks are in the wild since more than 6 weeks.
They solve the problem without any userspace interaction.

The userspace provided preferrable victim list is an improvement of the
generic heuristic and therefor imperfect selection mechanism and nothing
else.

tglx