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 -- 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>