Re: [RFC] Fine-grained memory priorities and PI

[Andi Kleen]

> 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
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