[Sugar-devel] Killing activities when memory gets short

[Jon Nettleton]

On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>>> Can't we just _close it nicely_?
>>
>> When you are about to get into OOM?
>
> Early on so we avoid OOM for most cases. Right now our OOM use cases
> have nothing to do with misbehaved activities.
>
> Once you're in "about to get into OOM", sugar-shell is unlikely to get
> many cycles (and python is a bad lang to try handling this). If you
> can seed the OOM scores of the process early on, you have a chance
> that OOM will kill a reasonably "correct" one. (Not sure what the
> state of play is with seeding the OOM scores from userland).
>
>> point we should have given the activities and/or the user the option
>> to avoid this situation.
>
> I think it's the only thing we can reasonably do. And [if possible],
> seed OOM scores.
>
> When things get tight, only the kernel has a standing chance to run code.

Has anyone looked into the Android Low Memory Killer kernel patch?
Google has already addressed this limitation with Android and done a
relatively good job at it.  Their stuff is fit to run in 128MB of
memory which is much less than an XO has.

Jon