Taming the OOM killer [LWN.net]

Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 12, 2009 14:32 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Taming the OOM killer by martinfick
Parent article: Taming the OOM killer

The OOM killer does not come into play when malloc is called. If malloc is called when there in no memory there is no need to kill any processes, malloc simply fails and return the appropriate error code.

Ah, I didn't realize that. From the way people talk it sounded as though malloc() would always succeed and then the process would just blow up trying to use the memory. If the only memory overcommit is COW due to fork() then it's not so bad (though I still think some kind of vfork() would be a more hygienic practice).

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Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 12, 2009 15:23 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

malloc() isn't implemented by the kernel, you might do better to listen to someone who knows what they're talking about. :/

Taming the OOM killer

Posted Feb 12, 2009 16:06 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

vfork tends to be strongly discouraged nowdays. it can be used safely, but it's easy to not use safely.

there are a growing number of such functions in C nowdays as people go back and figure out where programmers commonly get it wrong and provide functions that are much harder to misuse (the case that springs to mind are the string manipulation routines)