RPI3 swap experiments (grace under pressure)

[Jedi Tek'Unum]

On Aug 15, 2018, at 7:55 AM, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> 
> Jedi Tek'Unum wrote this message on Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 17:17 -0500:
>> I have one question??? when was the last time anyone saw Solaris kill a process because the system was under memory stress? In my experience, NEVER! And I wouldn???t say that the system became unreasonably unresponsive either.
> 
> At least for Solaris 2.5, they would not allow overallocation of swap...
> If you had pages that could be modified, you had to have enough swap
> storage to store a copy of those pages...  If you didn't, you'd get an
> out of memory error when trying to allocate the memory, such as forking,
> sbrk or mmap'ing...

That’s an entirely different situation. The process that wants the memory gets the error from a syscall.

The only “crime” that the OOM killer victim has is that it was selected because of its state. Gets no chance to do anything useful - just boom, gone.