Re: killed: out of swap

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 07:59:33PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
 > > What might be interesting is a way to influence the order in which
 > > processes are chosen to kill...
 > 
 > I don't see any realistic way of doing anything with that.
 > It's basically the first process that tries to allocate another page when
 > there are no more. There are no other processes at that moment in time that
 > have the problem, so why should any of them be considered?

There are certainly ways. The history of the linux oom-killer makes
for pretty good reading, actually.

You want to find the process that's actually causing the problem, not
some random process that happens to be the one to step in the hole.

NetBSD doesn't do this very well; usually in my experience an OOM
situation results in syslogd getting killed, which is both unhelpful
in terms of freeing up resources and actively bad for other reasons.
It's also not uncommon for the ax to fall on the X server, which does
usually end up releasing resources but is pretty much never what the
user wants.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost