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    SubjectRe: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1
    With the recent discussion of OOM and killers, why again was it a bad
    thing to just return a NULL upon a memory request that would otherwise
    fail? Isn't this by definition to way xalloc() operates?

    It seems to me that if there is a program out there that is not written
    to act accordingly to a NULL pointer upon a memory alloc request then it's
    time the program was repaired.

    <clap clap clap> for the mm patch, it's a good thing. Mayeb not the best
    but a good thing nonetheless.

    My only fear about having 'OOM killer-liek code' in the kernel is what if
    something important attempts to allocate memory that does not exist? Such
    as a very important cron-job, or something that would be devastating to
    the system if just killed (fsck OOM?)

    You can't expect the kernel to come up with a better method of handling
    out of memory. There is no one solution to oom for every program other
    than to let every program handle the situation itself as deemed necessary
    by the programs author.

    And as per the remark on 'a malicious attempt' this is unaviodable even
    if teh oom code is modified. If joe-user allocates all available memory
    then all new processes WILL fail until the admin goes, hey, look at this
    app here eating 80% of the 512MB memory, oh gee how odd "kill <pid>".

    Arbitrarily or even decisively killing processes is not the answer.


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