Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

[Jonathan Morton]

>I thought of some things which could break it, which I want to try and deal
>with before releasing a patch.  Specifically, I want to make freepages.min
>sacrosanct, so that malloc() *never* tries to use it.  This should be
>fairly easy to implement - simply subtract freepages.min from the freemem
>part.  An even nicer way would be to subtract freepages.low (or some
>similar value) instead of freepages.min for non-root or non-privileged
>processes.

Hmm, interesting.  Even with my modification - which means that
vm_enough_memory() will always return false if the allocation would clobber
freepages.min - I can still trigger OOM quite easily.  Even with no swap on
my box, there's a lot of disk activity, probably due to there being
virtually no disk cache left - could the generation of disk buffer and
cache pages be bypassing vm_enough_memory()?  If so, would using
freepages.low as the threshold rather than freepages.min help at all? (or
have I got everything muddled...)

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from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
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