linux-kernel - 2.6.23.8: OOM killer kills wrong jobs

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Message-ID: <47591183.8050402@ribosome.natur.cuni.cz>
Date:	Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:25:23 +0100
From:	Martin MOKREJŠ <mmokrejs@...osome.natur.cuni.cz>
To:	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: 2.6.23.8: OOM killer kills wrong jobs

Hi,
  first of all, sorry for not being up to date with how the OOM killer
works. I think there used to be a kernel config option to disable
OOM killer and instead kill the process which actually asks for the
memory and supposedly caused the memory lack. That is what I would
like to have on my system. I a have a 1GB RAM laptop and use t-coffee
software from http://www.tcoffee.org/Projects_home_page/t_coffee_home_page.html
to do some science. ;) 

# grep Killed /tmp/dmesg.killed.txt 
Killed process 5733 (seamonkey-bin)
Killed process 10011 (t_coffee)
Killed process 5647 (FvwmPager)
Killed process 5659 (xterm)
#

Killing just t_coffee would have been enough.

$ perl -e 'print ">one\n"; print "ATGCCGTAAATGCATG"x100000; print "\n>two"; print "GGGGCCCCAT"x1000; print "\n"' > testcase.txt 
$ t_coffee testcase.txt
... [you should run out of memory soon]

So, how can I change the behaviour or kernel?
Please Cc: me in replies. Thanks.
Martin

View attachment "dmesg.killed.txt" of type "text/plain" (63253 bytes)