Hi Alan, On 05/13/2016 05:01 PM, One Thousand Gnomes wrote: > On Fri, 13 May 2016 15:34:52 +0200 > Sebastian Frias <sf84@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> Hi Austin, >> >> On 05/13/2016 03:11 PM, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote: >>> On 2016-05-13 08:39, Sebastian Frias wrote: >>>> >>>> My point is that it seems to be possible to deal with such conditions in a more controlled way, ie: a way that is less random and less abrupt. >>> There's an option for the OOM-killer to just kill the allocating task instead of using the scoring heuristic. This is about as deterministic as things can get though. >> >> By the way, why does it has to "kill" anything in that case? >> I mean, shouldn't it just tell the allocating task that there's not enough memory by letting malloc return NULL? > > Just turn off overcommit and it will do that. With overcommit disabled > the kernel will not hand out address space in excess of memory plus swap. I think I'm confused. Michal just said: "And again, overcommit=never doesn't imply no-OOM. It just makes it less likely. The kernel can consume quite some unreclaimable memory as well." which I understand as the OOM-killer will still lurk around and could still wake up. Will overcommit=never totally disable the OOM-Killer or not? Best regards, Sebastian -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>