Hi...
I saw that others had replied your questions with good answers, so
probably I just add something...
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Anand Raj Manickam <anandrm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have a few doubts regarding Out of Memory .
>
> 1.Does memory leak in the kernel always lead to OOM ?
sooner or later yes. And kernel won't get OOM-ed...it will simply
continously leaking if the code is buggy until it stop by itself. Or
the kernel no longer has free memory pages available from all zones. I
think, in the worst case scenario, it will silently crash the kernel.
> 2. I wrote a kernel test module testing the memory leak , which on
> exit kmallocs
>
> exit_module ()
> {
> while(1)
> kmalloc((8*1024),GFP_KERNEL);
> }
>
> so when i rmmod test , the kernel never panicked on OOM , but it
> panicked on the page allocation stat (sorry for not attaching the
> dump)
sorry, what do you mean by "page allocation stat"?
> Does the kernel differentiate between a Memory Leak and a Out of
> memory situation ?
IMHO it's not about whether we see it from kernel or user space
perspective. It's about each of their meaning.
Memory leak is a condition where allocation happens but reclaim
doesn't happen at the same amount of allocation, thus there is an
(growing) amount of stale memory.
While OOM refers to a condition where allocator no longer able to find
and assign free memory page for the requester, whether it comes from
free directly memory pool or by previously flush page cache.
--
regards,
Mulyadi Santosa
Freelance Linux trainer and consultant
blog: the-hydra.blogspot.com
training: mulyaditraining.blogspot.com
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