On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:

On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:

quoted

quoted

I'm also willing to maintain it ;-)

Linus, how would you feel about an interface that allows
people to insomd/rmmod their own OOM handler ?

I hate the idea.

*grin*

I agree with that, except for one small point...

I agree too: if we're out of memory hard enough to trigger the in-kernel
handler, blowing away almost anything would be an improvement. Ideally,
action should be taken by userspace long before this point...

quoted

I dislike that kind of approach in general. I don't like plug-in
schedulers, etc either. I think it's a cop-out, saying that we
cannot do a good enough job, and claiming that it's such a
difficult problem that we should let the user decide.

... the generic OOM killer we have in the system right now
should do a good job in most of the cases, but I've heard
from a number of people who would like to have the OOM killer
do something "special" for their system.

For instance, they want to have student programs killed before
staff programs, or want to be able to specify some priveledged
processes that will never be killed (or do other things that
we probably don't want to have in the generic killer).

quoted

In short, it's one of those things that sounds like a good idea,
but that results in absolute crap in the end.

Sure, but the idea is to keep this absolute crap out of
the kernel and local to the systems where people need
to replace the OOM killer because of special reasons ;)

Which begs the question, where did the userspace OOM policy daemon go? It,
coupled with Rik's simple in-kernel last-ditch handler, should cover most
eventualities without the need for nasty kernel kludges.


James.

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