2.6.39-rc4+: oom-killer busy killing tasks

[Christian Kujau]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2011 at 11:58, Minchan Kim wrote:
> You would try to allocate a page from DMA as you don't have a normal zone.
> 
> Although free pages in DMA zone is about 3M, free pages of zone is
> below min of DMA zone. So zone_watermark_ok would be failed.
> 
> But I wonder why VM can't reclaim the pages. As I see the log, there
> are lots of slab pages(710M) in DMA zone while LRU pages are very
> small. SLAB pages are things VM has a trouble to reclaim. I am not
> sure 710M of SLAB is reasonable size. Don't you have experience same
> problem in old kernel?
> If you see the problem first in 2.6.39-rc4, maybe it would be a
> regression(ex, might be slab memory leak)
> Could you get the information about slabinfo(ex, cat /proc/slabinfo)
> right before OOM happens.
> It could say culprit.

It happened again, and again it's du(1) invoking the OOM killer (I'm 
running du(1) accross a few directories every 6hrs). This time I got 
/proc/slabinfo as well:

  http://nerdbynature.de/bits/2.6.39-rc4/oom/
  * NOTE: slabinfo.txt.gz deflates to ~40MB!)
  * messages-2.txt contains the messages of last night's OOM, which
   started at Apr 22 00:10:16 PDT

Thanks for looking into it.

Christian.
-- 
BOFH excuse #140:

LBNC (luser brain not connected)