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From: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/5] mm: Add __GFP_NO_OOM_KILL flag
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 00:50:41 +0200
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On Friday 08 May 2009, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 8 May 2009 00:14:48 +0200
> "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl> wrote:
> 
> > IOW, you need to freeze the user space totally before trying to disable the
> > OOM killer.
> 
> Not necessarily.  We only need to take action if a task is about to
> start oom-killing - presumably by taking a nap.
> 
> If a process is sitting there happily computing pi then we can leave it
> running.

Well, the point is we don't really know what the task is going to do next.
Is it going to continue computing pi, or is it going to execl(huge_binary), for
example?

If we knew what tasks were going to do in advance, the whole freezing wouldn't
really be necessary. :-)