Re: Out of memory kernel death

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Wed, 7 May 1997 09:43:54 -0400

From: Rik van Riel <Rik.vanRiel@phil.ruu.nl>
Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 15:24:43 +0200 (MET DST)

I read this thread and linux does indead have this problem.
I also read the FreeBSD sourcecode, and saw a (somewhat)
elegant solution for this. If FreeBSD is out of memory, it
looks through the processes and kills off the largest one.
This should be doable in Linux too...

The problem is that the largest process is often the X server. Often
this will indeed free a lot of memory, but it's not necessarily the best
thing to do...

- Ted