Re: [RFC] simple_lmk: Introduce Simple Low Memory Killer for Android

[Sultan Alsawaf <sultan@kerneltoast.com>]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 05:11:25PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> But the point is that a transient temporary memory spike should not be a
> signal to kill _any_ process.  The reaction to kill shouldn't be so
> spontaneous that unwanted tasks are killed because the system went into
> panic mode. It should be averaged out which I believe is what PSI does.

In my patch from the first email, I implemented the decision to kill a process
at the same time that the existing kernel OOM killer decides to kill a process.
If the kernel's OOM killer were susceptible to killing processes due to
transient memory spikes, then I think there would have been several complaints
about this behavior regardless of which userspace or architecture is in use.
I think the existing OOM killer has this done right.

The decision to kill a process occurs after the page allocator has tried _very_
hard to satisfy a page allocation via alternative means, such as utilizing
compaction, flushing file-backed pages to disk via kswapd, and direct reclaim.
Once all of those means have failed, it is quite reasonable to kill a process to
free memory. Trying to wait out the memory starvation at this point would be
futile.

Thanks,
Sultan