Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 8 Feb 2006 12:55:21 -0800 | From | Paul Jackson <> | Subject | Re: Terminate process that fails on a constrained allocation |
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Can anyone give us a good reason why we shouldn't just remove the oom killer, entirely?
Christoph wrote: > If a task has restricted its memory allocation to one node and does > excessive allocations then that process needs to die not other processes > that are harmlessly running on the node and that may not be allocating > memory at the time.
That _exact_ same argument applies to a system that only has one node.
If we want to remove the oom killer, lets just remove the oom killer.
> People are accustomed of having random processes killed? <shudder>
That's what the oom killer does ... well, it makes an honest effort not to be random.
So, yes, since it has been there a long time, people are used to it. Maybe they don't like it, maybe with good reason. But it is there.
> OOM killing makes > sense for global allocations if the system is really tight on memory and > survival is the main goal
If that argument justifies OOM killing on a simple UMA system, then surely, for -some- critical tasks, it justifies it on a big NUMA system.
Either OOM is useful in some cases or it is not.
-- I won't rest till it's the best ... Programmer, Linux Scalability Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> 1.925.600.0401 - 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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