Under 2.6.14 (UML), I have a workload that runs with 64 megs ram and 256
megs swap space. It completes (albeit swapping like mad) with swappiness
at the default 60, but if I set it to 0 the OOM killer kicks in and the
script aborts.
You should get some debugging output in dmesg when the OOM killer kicks
in, can you post this?
oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x400d2, order=0
Free pages: 1416kB (0kB HighMem)
Active:14014 inactive:718 dirty:1 writeback:0 unstable:0 free:354 slab:468 mapped:14722 pagetables:58
DMA free:1416kB min:1024kB low:1280kB high:1536kB active:56056kB inactive:2872kB present:65536kB pages_scanned:26577 all_unreclaimable? no
Out of Memory: Killed process 30055 (cc1).
Badness in handle_page_fault at /home/landley/newbuild/firmware-build/tmpdir/linux-2.6.14/arch/um/kernel/trap_kern.c:98