Re: swapping and oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x201d2, order=0

From: Mike Galbraith
Date: Fri May 12 2006 - 01:49:47 EST


On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 15:14 +0300, Al Boldi wrote:
> The current mm behaviour in 2.6, during physical memory exhaustion, expresses
> itself as an oom-killing spree, while the kernel could have resorted to
> swapping.
>
> Is there a reason why oom-killing is currently preferred over swapping?

Looks to me like you booted with mem=8m, and these allocations are
failing because every page the page allocator tried to issue were marked
as being reserved. The SysRq-M output shows that it did try to swap as
it limped along.

My box won't get past a black screen hang with less than mem=24m, so I'm
kinda surprised you got far enough to even add swap.

-Mike

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