Re: Misleading OOM messages

[Pavel Machek]

On Thu 2009-05-14 15:46:50, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 14 May 2009, Pavel Machek wrote:
> 
> > It can be 'low on memory' if you play with mlock() a bit.
> 
> But that is a reclaim failure becuase of mlocking pages.
> 
> > It is out of memory if you run out of swap (or have no swap to begin with).
> 
> That is a swap config issue.

Well, many machines are _designed_ to run without swap. Swapping on
flash is considered bad.

> > I believe message is often correct. What message would you suggest?
> 
> "Failure to reclaim memory"

That is not a helpful message, I'm afraid. What about

 "Memory allocation failure" ?
 "Out of memory, or failed to allocate memory due to temporary spike"?

									Pavel
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