> Naturally this is all still in the vaporware stage, but I think that > if implemented the concept might at least improve the OOM/low-memory > situation considerably. Starting to fail allocations for the cluster > programs (including their kernel allocations) well before failing > them for the swap-fallback tool would help the original poster, and I > imagine various tweaked priorities would make true OOM-deadlock far > less likely.
The problem is that deadlocks can happen even without anybody running out of virtual memory. The deadlocks GFP_CRITICAL was supposed to handle are deadlocks while swapping out data because the swapping on some devices needs more memory by itself. This happens long before anything is running into a true oom. It's just that the memory cleaning stage cannot make progress anymore. Your proposal isn't addressing this problem at all I think. Handling true OOM is a quite different issue. -Andi - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html