oom killer and its superior braindamage in 2.4

[David Mansfield <lkml@dm.cobite.com>]

Marc, Rik,

> - Feb 21 10:04:57 codeman kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 2657 
> (apache).
>
> The above log entry (apache) appeared for about 4 hours every some 
> seconds (same PID) until I thought about sysrq-b to get out of this 
> braindead behaviour. The machine was somewhat dead for me because I was 
> not able to do anything but sysrq. The system itself was _not_ dead, 
> there was massive disk i/o. This is 2.4.20 vanilla.

This exact thing happened to me as well, on a 2.4.20-pre that hasn't been 
upgraded to 2.4.20 yet.  The thing that concerns me most is:

Why won't the system kill the process it claims to be killing?

If, in Marc's case, the system wants to kill PID 2657, a lowly sleeping 
apache process, why can't it?  This is a bug for sure.

For me, there was some python process chosen as the one for killing and it 
repeated the 'Out of Memory: Killed process xxxxx (python)' for hours 
while making no progress.  The machine was still routing packets but I 
couldn't log in.  Sys-rq was disabled, so I was forced to use the big red 
button.

Rik, any ideas?

David

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| David Mansfield              |
| lkml@dm.cobite.com           |
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