On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, Tetsuo Handa wrote: > Why can't we think about choosing more OOM victims instead of granting access > to memory reserves? > We have no indication of which thread is holding a mutex that would need to be killed, so we'd be randomly killing processes waiting for forward progress. A worst-case scenario would be the thread is OOM_DISABLE and we kill every process on the system needlessly. This problem obviously occurs often enough that killing all userspace isnt going to be a viable solution. > Also, SysRq might not be usable under OOM because workqueues can get stuck. > The panic_on_oom_timeout was first proposed using a workqueue but was > updated to use a timer because there is no guarantee that workqueues work > as expected under OOM. > I don't know anything about a panic_on_oom_timeout, but panicking would only be a reasonable action if memory reserves were fully depleted. That could easily be dealt with in the page allocator so there's no timeout involved. -- 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>