Re: [PATCH 1/5] mm: Add __GFP_NO_OOM_KILL flag

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 8 May 2009 00:50:41 +0200
"Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Friday 08 May 2009, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 8 May 2009 00:14:48 +0200
> > "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > > IOW, you need to freeze the user space totally before trying to disable the
> > > OOM killer.
> > 
> > Not necessarily.  We only need to take action if a task is about to
> > start oom-killing - presumably by taking a nap.
> > 
> > If a process is sitting there happily computing pi then we can leave it
> > running.
> 
> Well, the point is we don't really know what the task is going to do next.
> Is it going to continue computing pi, or is it going to execl(huge_binary), for
> example?
> 
> If we knew what tasks were going to do in advance, the whole freezing wouldn't
> really be necessary. :-)

argh.  Third time:

- if the task is computing pi, let it do so.

- if the task tries to allocate memory and succeeds, let it proceed.

- if the task tries to allocate memory and fails and then tries to invoke
  the oom-killer, stop the task.

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