Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

[Christian Bodmer]

I can't say I understand the whole MM system, however the random killing of 
processes seems like a rather unfortunate solution to the problem. If someone 
has a spare minute, maybe they could explain to me why running out of free 
memory in kswapd results in a deadlock situation.

That aside, would it be an improvement to define another process flag 
(PF_OOMPRESERVE) that would declare a process as undesirable to be killed in an 
OOM situation, so that the user has at least some control over what gets killed 
first or last respectively. Only when select_bad_process() runs out of 
unflagged processes will it then proceed to kill the processes with this new 
flag.

Just an idea, I am pretty sure there's tons of reasons why not to introduce a 
new per process flag.

/Cheers
Chris