Re: 4.8.8 kernel trigger OOM killer repeatedly when I have lots of RAM that should be free

[Marc MERLIN]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:14:50AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Anyway, none of this seems new per se. I'm adding Kent and Jens to the
> cc (Tejun already was), in the hope that maybe they have some idea how
> to control the nasty worst-case behavior wrt workqueue lockup (it's
> not really a "lockup", it looks like it's just hundreds of workqueues
> all waiting for IO to complete and much too deep IO queues).
 
I'll take your word for it, all I got in the end was
Kernel panic - not syncing: Hard LOCKUP
and the system stone dead when I woke up hours later.

> And I think your NMI watchdog then turns the "system is no longer
> responsive" into an actual kernel panic.

Ah, I see.

Thanks for the reply, and sorry for bringing in that separate thread
from the btrfs mailing list, which effectively was a suggestion similar
to what you're saying here too.

Marc
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Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/                         | PGP 1024R/763BE901