From: Chen Jie <chenjie6@xxxxxxxxxx> It's possible that an oom killed victim shares an ->mm with the init process and thus oom_kill_process() would end up trying to kill init as well. This has been shown in practice: Out of memory: Kill process 9134 (init) score 3 or sacrifice child Killed process 9134 (init) total-vm:1868kB, anon-rss:84kB, file-rss:572kB Kill process 1 (init) sharing same memory ... Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000009 And this will result in a kernel panic. If a process is forked by init and selected for oom kill while still sharing init_mm, then it's likely this system is in a recoverable state. However, it's better not to try to kill init and allow the machine to panic due to unkillable processes. [rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx: rewrote changelog] Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Chen Jie <chenjie6@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx> --- I removed stable from this patch since the alternative would most likely be to panic the system for no killable processes anyway. There's a very small likelihood this patch would allow for a recoverable system. mm/oom_kill.c | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c --- a/mm/oom_kill.c +++ b/mm/oom_kill.c @@ -608,6 +608,8 @@ void oom_kill_process(struct oom_control *oc, struct task_struct *p, continue; if (unlikely(p->flags & PF_KTHREAD)) continue; + if (!is_global_init(p)) + continue; if (p->signal->oom_score_adj == OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN) continue; -- 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>