Swap usage discussion

[Alan Dayley]

Ed Skinner said:
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>      If you're looking at the sources, oom_kill.c and out_of_memory()
> have
> intrigued me for some time. The nitty-gritty details are interesting but
> they  also demonstrate a very basic assumption that, at least some,
> developers  should be aware of. And that is that under certain
> circumstances, Linux  considers itself (the kernel) more important than
> the application programs  (with some qualifications you can read about
> in this particular source file).  The sources indirectly show how to
> avoid having your process killed off, and  the configuration even allows
> this "feature" to be disabled, but if  developers don't know this
> feature is present, then ... ... ...
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Preventing the kernel from kill off a process could be very important for
certain applications.  I'll have to bookmark that reference for later
study and maybe point the customer at it.

Alan