On Fri, 19 Aug 2011, Denys Vlasenko wrote:

Exactly. Server has no means to know when the situation is
bad enough to start killing. IIRC now the rule is simple:
OOM killing starts only when allocations fail.

Perhaps it is possible to add "start OOM killing if less than N free
pages are available", but this will be complex, and won't be good enough
for some configs with many zones (thus, will require even more complications).

Allocations start to fail, and oom killings then start to occur, only when 
the set of allowed zones fall below their minimum watermarks which usually 
includes several hundred kilobytes or several megabytes of free memory for 
lowmem situations.

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