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SubjectRe: VM: add would_have_oomkilled sysctl
On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 11:21:20AM -0700, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Aug 2011, Dave Jones wrote:
>
> > At various times in the past, we've had reports where users have been
> > convinced that the oomkiller was too heavy handed. I added this sysctl
> > mostly as a knob for them to see that the kernel really doesn't do much better
> > without killing something.
> >
>
> The page allocator expects that the oom killer will kill something to free
> memory so it takes a temporary timeout and then retries the allocation
> indefinitely. We never oom kill unless we are going to retry
> indefinitely, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile.
>
> That said, the only time the oom killer doesn't actually do something is
> when it detects an exiting thread that will hopefully free memory soon or
> when it detects an eligible thread that has already been oom killed and
> we're waiting for it to exit. So this patch will result in an endless
> series of unratelimited printk's.
>
> Not sure that's very helpful.

It's an old patch, and the oom-killer heuristics have improved since then,
as this didn't used to be the case. Regardless, I'll just drop it from Fedora.

thanks,

Dave


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