On Friday, July 17, 2020 10:06:53 AM MST Benjamin Berg wrote:
On Fri, 2020-07-17 at 09:12 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 14, 2020 1:18:08 AM MST Benjamin Berg wrote:
> > So, we don't want to get the kernel into the situation where it must
> > remove executables/libraries from main memory. If that happens, you can
> > end up hitting the disk for *every* function call.
>
> If this is true, then we shouldn't enable EarlyOOM, as it will kill
> processes from in main memory.
I am not sure what you are saying, and I fear there is some sort of
misunderstanding here or at least a different way of thinking about the
problem.
As described below, this Change is enabling a daemon that purposefully kills
users processes. That's not a good thing.
What we achieve by killing a process is that we give the kernel more
flexibility in how it manages the available memory. It really doesn't
matter what you kill, all that matters is that some memory is free'ed
up again.
It does matter what you kill, because you're wiping out users' data and
stopping software the user intended to have run. The kernel is already more
than capable of freeing memory for itself, that's not what this Change is for
either. This Change is to abuse the OOM killer to run in non-OOM scenarios
using a userspace daemon.
--
John M. Harris, Jr.