Re: OOM Killer don't works at all if the system have >gigabytesmemory (was Re: [PATCH] mm: check zone->all_unreclaimable inall_unreclaimable())

From: David Rientjes
Date: Mon May 16 2011 - 16:46:19 EST


On Fri, 13 May 2011, CAI Qian wrote:

> I have had a chance to test this patch after applied this patch manually
> (dd not apply cleanly) on the top of mainline kernel. The test is still
> running because it is trying to kill tons of python processes instread
> of the parent. Isn't there a way for oom to be smart enough to do
> "killall python"?

Not without userspace doing that explicitly, the oom killer attempts to
only kill the most memory-hogging task to free memory. If you're test is
constantly forking new processes which allocate memory then the oom killer
will just keep killing those children anytime it is out of memory.
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