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OOM killer.

DISCUSSION Andrey Nekrasov 2 participants 2 messages Jan 23, 2002

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Help.

Is it possible to disable VM-killer completely?

Or make it not kill some critical tools. I want, for example, that in any situation sshd/nfsd/cron remained alive.

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Andrey Nekrasov, SpyLOG.
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Quoted 4 lines · Andrey Nekrasov

Help.

Is it possible to disable VM-killer completely?

Obviously not - it triggers only when there isn't enough memory to continue. The alternative to a OOM killer routine is either a kernel that locks up effectively killing everything, or a kernel that allocates all memory early requiring a _lot_ more memory to run at all. (If you had that memory you wouldn't run out in the first place.)

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Or make it not kill some critical tools. I want, for example, that in any situation sshd/nfsd/cron remained alive.

The trivial fix is to start sshd/nfsd/cron from /etc/inittab, similiar to how getty usually starts. They may still get killed, but init will restart them asap.

Adding a lot of swap is also a good idea - the machine will merely slow down instead of killing something.

Helge Hafting