Re: Andrea VM changes

[Marcelo Tosatti]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 12:43:27 -0300 (BRT)
From: Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
     Mike Fedyk <mfedyk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Antonio Vargas <wind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
     lkml <linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
     Marc-Christian Petersen <m.c.p@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Andrea VM changes



On Sun, 31 Aug 2003, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> This oom killer on desktops may do a worse selections of the task to
> kill (the usual ssh now has a chance to be killed), but it fixes the oom
> deadlocks and it won't do stupid things on servers shall a netscape or
> whatever else app hit an userspace bug. So I've to prefer it, until I
> will write a reliable algorithm for the oom killing that won't fall into
> dosable corner cases so easily (mlock/nfs/database as the three most
> common examples of where current mainline can fail, btw the lowmem
> shortage is another very common DoS that the oom killer will never
> notice, my tree doesn't deadlock [or at least not technically, in
> practice it may look like a kernel deadlock despite syscalls returns
> -ENOMEM ;) ] during lowmem shortage on the 64G boxes).

Suppose you have a big fat hog leaking (lets say, netscape) allocating
pages at a slow pace. Now you have a decent well behaved app who is
allocating at a fast pace, and gets killed.

The chance the well behaved app gets killed is big, right? 


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