Re: Commenting out out_of_memory() function in __alloc_pages()

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Sat Jul 08 2006 - 14:05:09 EST


Abu M. Muttalib wrote:
Hi,

I am getting the Out of memory.

To circumvent the problem, I have commented the call to "out_of_memory(),
and replaced "goto restart" with "goto nopage".

At "nopage:" lable I have added a call to "schedule()" and then "return
NULL" after "schedule()".

Bad idea - in the configuration you have, the system may need the out-of-memory killer to free up memory, otherwise the system can deadlock due to all memory being exhausted.


I tried the modified kernel with a test application, the test application is
mallocing memory in a loop. Unlike as expected the process gets killed. On
second run of the same application I am getting the page allocation failure
as expected but subsequently the system hangs.

I am attaching the test application and the log herewith.

I am getting this exception with kernel 2.6.13. With kernel
2.4.19-rmka7-pxa1 there was no problem.

Why its so? What can I do to alleviate the OOM problem?

Please see Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting in the kernel source tree.

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hancockr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

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