[ Thanks to Jeremy
Andrews for this link. ]
“With the release of 2.4.23-pre4, the OOM-killer was removed
from the 2.4 stable Linux kernel. 2.4 kernel maintainer Marcelo
Tosatti reflected on recent problems this has created.“The particular example was regarding changed behavior when
doing ‘gzip -dc file | less’ with a 280MB file on a system that
doesn’t have enough RAM. Prior to the OOM-killer having been
removed, ‘less’ was properly being killed. However since
2.4.23-pre4 was released other process are also being killed.
Marcello summarizes, ‘So a lot of processes which should not
get killed are dying. This is really bad. I was afraid it could
happen and it did. What now? Resurrect OOM-killer?‘ The
resulting discussion did not lead to a definite conclusion, though
it looks likely that the OOM-killer will find it’s way back into
the 2.4 kernel before 2.4.23 is released…”