On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Even though the situation may not require a kill, the user still wants
> > to know that the memory hard limit was breached and the isolation
> > broken in order to prevent a kill. We just came really close and the
>
> You can observe that you are getting into troubles from fail counter
> already. The usability without more reclaim statistics is a bit
> questionable but you get a rough impression that something is wrong at
> least.
>
Agreed, but it seems like the appropriate mechanism for this is through
the memory.{,memsw.}usage_in_bytes notifiers which already exist.
> > fact that current is exiting is coincidental. Not everybody is having
> > OOM situations on a frequent basis and they might want to know when
> > they are redlining the system and that the same workload might blow up
> > the next time it's run.
>
> I am just concerned that signaling temporal OOM conditions which do not
> require any OOM killer action (user or kernel space) might be confusing.
> Userspace would have harder times to tell whether any action is required
> or not.
>
Completely agreed, in fact there is no reliable and non-racy way in
userspace to determine "is this a real oom condition that I must act upon
or can the kernel handle it?"
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