shrinking memory consumptions

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 06:20:44PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02 2007, Jim Gettys wrote:
> > You won't get anyone to take that bet....  Care to work on it?  The
> > people who've been working the most on providing a decent user interface
> > experience in the face of OOM are the Nokia folks; I can send you some
> > contacts.
> 
> Didn't figure I would :-) And yeah, I don't mind taking a look at low
> memory and OOM situations.

I've been working on a SIGDANGER equivalent for Linux - so that we
can signal applications once a certain lower limit of memory has been
reached. I'm currently busy with the resume work, but plan to get back
to SIGDANGER once we're finished with PM.

We need certainly need to tune the OOM killer - I've done some testing
with recent v2.6 kernels on our machines and it does behave very badly,
killing daemons which are not the memory hog in question, for example

/proc/pid/oom_adj and oom_score need to be adjusted.