Re: Terminate process that fails on a constrained allocation

From: Christoph Lameter
Date: Wed Feb 08 2006 - 15:35:02 EST


On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Paul Jackson wrote:

> The new logic would be -- only kill tasks that are constrained to
> the same or a subset of the same nodes as the current task.

If a task has restricted its memory allocation to one node and does
excessive allocations then that process needs to die not other processes
that are harmlessly running on the node and that may not be allocating
memory at the time.

> At the same time, a typical bootcpuset would have oom killer behaviour
> resembling what people have become accustomed to.

People are accustomed of having random processes killed? <shudder>

> If we are going to neuter or eliminate the oom killer, it seems like
> we should do it across the board, not just on numa boxes using
> some form of memory constraint (mempolicy or cpuset).

We are terminating processes perform restricted allocations. Restricted
allocations are only possible on NUMA boxes so the phrase "numa boxes
using some form of memory constraint" is a tautology. OOM killing makes
sense for global allocations if the system is really tight on memory and
survival is the main goal even if he have to cannibalize processes.
However, cannibalism is still a taboo.

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