On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 01:20:30 -0300, Mauricio Lin wrote: > Hi, > > --- Tetsuo Handa <from-kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escreveu: > > > Hello. > > > > For two weeks, I have been unable to complete > > "make modules_install" in Fedora Core 5 test 3. > > Today I tried again in Fedora Core 5, the result was the same. > > This is because "depmod" invoked by "make modules_install" > > consumes all RAM, resulting OOM-killer killing "depmod" itself. > > > > This would be a bug of "depmod", > > but the reason I post to this ML is that I want to know > > "What will happen to OOM-killer if no RAM is freeable?" > > What OOM Killer does it is to select and kill a process while no memory > is available. > After killing a process, all memory used by such process are free. > > What is your kernel version? > > > > > I once encountered a case that OOM-killer attempts to free > > RAM but unable to find any RAM, resulting infinite loop > > showing noisy messages rather than killing "depmod" itself. > > How do you know OOM-killer attempts to free RAM but unable to find any > RAM? Isn't it actually another thing, that looks like this? I think there is also a message printed when no memory is available, but can be freed by swapping. This can happen when the memory is almost, but not yet completely, full. In such situation the OOM-killer does NOT run yet, but swap starts trashing, making the computer hopelessly slow. So it may then take hours before the misbehaving process gets to touch the last page and actually fire OOM-kill. > > Can OOM-killer always return if OOM is caused by "depmod"? > > OOM Killer keeps killing processes and stop when memory is available > for new allocations. > > BR, > > Mauricio Lin. > > > I couldn't trace what system call was executing at that time, > > but I think the kernel was processing something that are related > > to kernel module functions such as init_module() because the > > process that caused OOM is "depmod". -- Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb@xxxxxx>
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