Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 6 Nov 2004 08:41:49 -0200 | From | Marcelo Tosatti <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer ... |
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Hi Andries,
On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 01:53:17PM +0100, Andries Brouwer wrote: > On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 06:01:18PM -0200, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > > My wife is almost killing me, its Friday night and I've been telling her > > "just another minute" for hours. Have to run. > > :-) > > > As you know the OOM is very problematic in 2.6 right now - so I went > > to investigate it. > > I have always been surprised that so few people investigated > doing things right, that is, entirely without OOM killer. > Apparently developers do not think about using Linux for serious work > where it can be a disaster, possibly even a life-threatening disaster, > when any process can be killed at any time.
Its just that the majority of users use total overcommit (the default), but you have a point.
> Ten years ago it was a bad waste of resources to have swapspace > lying around that would be used essentially 0% of the time. > But with todays disk sizes it is entirely feasible to have > a few hundred MB of "unused" swap space. A small price to > pay for the guarantee that no process will be OOM killed. > > A month ago I showed a patch that made overcommit mode 2 > work for me. Google finds it in http://lwn.net/Articles/104959/ > > So far, nobody commented. > > This is not in a state such that I would like to submit it, > but I think it would be good to focus some energy into > offering a Linux that is guaranteed free of OOM surprises.
I dont have any useful comments on patch on a quick look at it - but yes non-overcommit should be working correctly.
> So, let me repeat the RFC. > Apply the above patch, and do "echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory". > Now test. In case you have no, or only a small amount of swap space, > also do "echo 80 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio" or so.
Will test your patch later on the weekend and take a slower look at it, hopefully with useful comments. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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