[PATCH] oom-killer kills more than needed

From: Chad Zanonie
Date: Fri Sep 19 2008 - 14:06:56 EST


Signed-off-by: Chad Zanonie <chad.zanonie@xxxxxxxxx>

Possibility exists for an exiting application to be in between
marking its mm NULL and calling mmput when out_of_memory is
invoked. select_bad_process() will continue past this process as
opposed to returning -1UL due to its mm being NULL. This causes
the oom killer in certain scenarios to not only kill the memory
culprit, but also kill the runner up.

EXIT_DEAD seems to be the only flag that guarantees that mmput()
has finished. Checking for PF_KTHREAD should replace p->mm
regardless. Adding EXIT_DEAD to the check seems to prevent
unnecessary kills in local testing.


diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c
index 64e5b4b..ad3928a 100644
--- a/mm/oom_kill.c
+++ b/mm/oom_kill.c
@@ -216,7 +216,7 @@ static struct task_struct
*select_bad_process(unsigned long *ppoints,
* skip kernel threads and tasks which have already
released
* their mm.
*/
- if (!p->mm)
+ if (p->flags & PF_KTHREAD || p->flags & EXIT_DEAD)
continue;
/* skip the init task */
if (is_global_init(p))
--
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