From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Rafael J. Wysocki" Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/5] mm: Add __GFP_NO_OOM_KILL flag Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 00:50:41 +0200 Message-ID: <200905080050.41973.rjw__44783.0165307552$1241737107$gmane$org@sisk.pl> References: <200905080014.49426.rjw@sisk.pl> <20090507153824.df54658c.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20090507153824.df54658c.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Content-Disposition: inline List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: linux-pm-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org Errors-To: linux-pm-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org To: Andrew Morton Cc: kernel-testers@vger.kernel.org, rientjes@google.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk, jens.axboe@oracle.com, linux-pm@lists.linux-foundation.org, fengguang.wu@intel.com, torvalds@linux-foundation.org List-Id: linux-pm@vger.kernel.org On Friday 08 May 2009, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Fri, 8 May 2009 00:14:48 +0200 > "Rafael J. Wysocki" wrote: > > > IOW, you need to freeze the user space totally before trying to disable the > > OOM killer. > > Not necessarily. We only need to take action if a task is about to > start oom-killing - presumably by taking a nap. > > If a process is sitting there happily computing pi then we can leave it > running. Well, the point is we don't really know what the task is going to do next. Is it going to continue computing pi, or is it going to execl(huge_binary), for example? If we knew what tasks were going to do in advance, the whole freezing wouldn't really be necessary. :-)