Re: [olpc-software] graceful handling of out-of-memory conditions

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 11:35:45AM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> And as to the OOM killers behaviour - why does it not just kill whatever
> is using the most memory at the time? I never understood that though
> there must be a good reason.

Thats usually the X server, or the long running word processor with your vital
document in it, not the new application that just started and therefore issued
a lot of memory allocation requests...

People have spent something like ten years trying heuristics for the OOM
killer on Linux and not found a sane general case that always shoots the
right thing. OLPC is a more controlled environment so who knows maybe it can
be done