linux-kernel - Re: [patch 10/11 -mmotm] oom: avoid oom kill if no interruptible tasks

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Message-Id: <20090511143906.1cde5f6e.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date:	Mon, 11 May 2009 14:39:06 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>
Cc:	gregkh@...e.de, npiggin@...e.de, mel@....ul.ie,
	a.p.ziljstra@...llo.nl, cl@...ux-foundation.org,
	dave@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, san@...roid.com, arve@...roid.com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [patch 10/11 -mmotm] oom: avoid oom kill if no interruptible
 tasks

On Sun, 10 May 2009 15:07:25 -0700 (PDT)
David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com> wrote:

> If there are no interruptible system tasks other than kthreads,

It's unclear what the term "system task" means.  Just "task"?

> no task
> should be chosen for oom kill since they won't respond to the SIGKILL
> anyway.  Instead, we choose to simply fail page allocations if reclaim
> cannot free memory and hope for the best.

But plain old user processes enter and leave D state all the time.  The
task may well just be sitting there waiting for a disk read to
complete.  It will respond to the SIGKILL shortly after the IO
completes, so an appropriate action here is to just wait for that to
happen.

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