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. -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>