Re: [patch 10/11 -mmotm] oom: avoid oom kill if no interruptibletasks

[Andrew Morton]

On Sun, 10 May 2009 15:07:25 -0700 (PDT)
David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> If there are no interruptible system tasks other than kthreads,

It's unclear what the term "system task" means.  Just "task"?

> no task
> should be chosen for oom kill since they won't respond to the SIGKILL
> anyway.  Instead, we choose to simply fail page allocations if reclaim
> cannot free memory and hope for the best.

But plain old user processes enter and leave D state all the time.  The
task may well just be sitting there waiting for a disk read to
complete.  It will respond to the SIGKILL shortly after the IO
completes, so an appropriate action here is to just wait for that to
happen.

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