Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer from try_to_free_pages / all_unreclaimable braindamage

From: Werner Almesberger (wa_at_almesberger.net)
Date: 11/17/04

  • Next message: Hanno Meyer-Thurow: "Re: [2.6.10-rc2-mm1] OOPS on boot (hotplug related?)" 
    Date:	Wed, 17 Nov 2004 19:54:17 -0300
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

    Entering an old discussion ...

    Thomas Gleixner wrote:
    > context in which oom-killer is called. My concern is that the decision
    > critrion which process should be killed is not sufficient. In my case it
    > kills sshd instead of a process which forks a bunch of child processes.

    It recently occurred to me that we could have relatively light-weight
    voluntary victimization for known trouble-makers. E.g. in a desktop
    environment, the cause for trouble seems to be almost always the Web
    browser, or something closely related to it.

    A process could declare itself as usual suspect. This would then be
    recorded as a per-task flag, to be inherited by children. Now, one
    could write a launcher like this:

    int main(int argc,char **argv)
    {
        if (argc < 2) {
            fprintf(stderr,"usage: %s command [arguments...]\n",*argv);
            return 1;
        }
        sys_suspect_me();
        execvp(argv[1],argv+1);
        perror(argv[1]);
        return 1;
    }

    And then something like

    # mv /usr/bin/browser /usr/bin/browser.bin
    # echo '#!/bin/sh' >/usr/bin/browser
    # echo 'suspect_me /usr/bin/browser.bin "$@"' >>/usr/bin/browser
    # chmod 555 /usr/bin/browser

    or use an alias if you like your packet manager.

    Not sure if this would actually be useful in real life, but it looks
    at least like a relatively simple and flexible solution to a part of
    the selection problem.

    One could even consider getting rid of the suspects a while before
    hitting OOM, so that the system doesn't have to slow down before the
    inevitable killing.

    Not that'm getting many OOMs these days - my VNC setup is quite good
    at dying well before anything serious turns up :-(

    - Werner 

    -- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina         wa@almesberger.net /
/_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/
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  • Next message: Hanno Meyer-Thurow: "Re: [2.6.10-rc2-mm1] OOPS on boot (hotplug related?)"