OOM may be being too nice to killed processes

Adam Pennington (adamp@andrew.cmu.edu)
Sun, 04 Nov 2001 15:36:00 -0500


I may be misunderstanding this, but looking at this portion of code from
the oom task killer... Isn't it dangerous to give a process PF_MEMALLOC and
then only pass it a SIGTERM? My take is that the high priority bump up
should only happen for the force_sig(SIGKILL,p).

/*
* We give our sacrificial lamb high priority and access to
* all the memory it needs. That way it should be able to
* exit() and clear out its resources quickly...
*/
p->counter = 5 * HZ;
p->flags |= PF_MEMALLOC;

/* This process has hardware access, be more careful. */
if (cap_t(p->cap_effective) & CAP_TO_MASK(CAP_SYS_RAWIO)) {
force_sig(SIGTERM, p);
} else {
force_sig(SIGKILL, p);
}

Adam Pennington
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