linux-kernel - Re: OOM kernel behaviour

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:07:06 +0000
From:	Jonathan Miles <jon@...us.co.uk>
To:	Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux-foundation.org>
CC:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: OOM kernel behaviour

On 01/12/09 16:08 Christoph Lameter said the following:

> Anonymous page use may fluctuate unpredictably based on the processes
> being started. A spike may take out your system.

I agree that swap should be there for these times. Once I'm happy that
the system behaves properly without it, I'll re-enable swap and set a
low swappiness value.

> The kernel will prefer to reclaim from clean page cache over
> swapping in general. The aggressiveness of swap can be controlled via
> /proc/sys/vm/swappiness.
> 
> The OOM killer output shows that the DMA is zone is marked as
> unreclaimable but the allocation causing it is not using DMA. Other zones
> all seem to have enough memory. Is this straight 2.6.31? No use of
> containers, memory policies etc right?

Okay, so my kernel shouldn't be behaving like this?

It's Ubuntu's (Karmic) 2.6.31 .deb and I don't know exactly what they've
done to it, but AFAIK, no containers or policies. I'll compile 2.6.31.6
and test with that. Won't be able to do this until Friday, so will check
back in then.

Thanks,

J
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/