OOM problem?

[Johannes Lundberg]

On Fri, 8 Dec 2017 at 16:03, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 08, 2017 at 12:16:58PM +0200, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 08, 2017 at 08:18:21AM +0000, Johannes Lundberg wrote:
> > > Regarding potential oom overhaul. Personally I like the idea of an oom
> > > signal. The idea comes from iOS where applications get a callback when
> > > system memory is low and they're given a chance to free unused
> > > resources or resources that can easily be recreated, before getting
> > > killed completely.
> > The OOM signal is a topic which was discussed to death many times before.
> > The summary is that it does not work, because you need to provide pages
> > for userspace to be able to handle the signal.
>
> Just for the record, what I was proposing wasn't as ambitious as what
> Johannes suggested (while I like his idea it's "weird" and it's unlikely
> that Firefox et al would use it unless we got Linux to have the same
> thing).


I agree on that. Actually I thought Mac apps had it since iOS has it but
they don’t. Why is it weird that programs free resources they don’t use
when the system needs it? I think it’s a great solution, much better then
killing random programs. However, I don’t really expect it to be
implemented in anything but a commercial derivative of FreeBSD...

Maybe it instead can be implemented in GTK to keep GUI clients being good
citizens of the system.

Anyways, sorry for stealing the thread. PS, not my ideas - iOS memory
management.




>
> I was just suggesting that processes sleeping in vm_wait() wake up once
> in a while to respect signals, as in, if I kill -9 that process I want it
> to go away.  Currently, it doesn't.
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>