Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/896738/

The kernel tries hard to keep memory available for its present and future
needs. Should that effort fail, though, the tool of last resort is the
dreaded out-of-memory (OOM) killer, which is tasked with killing processes
on the system to free their memory and alleviate the problem. The results
of invoking the OOM killer are never going to be good, but they can be
distinctly worse if the wrong processes are chosen for an untimely end. As
one might expect, the effort to properly choose the right processes is an
ongoing effort. Most recently, Christian
König has proposed a
new mechanism to address a blind spot in the OOM killer’s
deliberations.