> But it still does not fix the random madness of oom-killer. Once it is
> triggered it keeps going even if there is 50MB free memory available.
> 

Additionally to Rik's and Kame's fixes, I changed the criterias in
oom_kill a bit to

- take processes which fork a lot of children into account instead of
killing stuff like portmap and sshd just because they haven't used a lot
of CPU time since they started.

- prevent oom-killer to continue to kill processes, even if memory is
available

I was facing the above problems on a small embedded system, where a
forking server started to flood the machine with child processes.
oom-killer killed portmap and sshd instead of the real culprit and took
away the opportunity to log into the machine remotely.

The problem can be simulated with hackbench on a small UP system.

I don't know, if these changes have any negative impacts on the
testcases which were used in the original design. Rik ??

tglx