On 28/01/2020 09:38, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2020 07:36:11 +0000
> The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
>
>> On 27/01/2020 19:04, Andy Burns wrote:
>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> druck wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> In practice the system will appear to hang for a while, possibly a
>>>>> long while, until applications which require more memory either exit
>>>>> cleanly or crash, freeing up some memory and/or swap.
>>>>
>>>> Er no. calls to malloc() will fail and serious errors in applications
>>>> will happen.
>
>  Nope malloc succeeds and processes get a SEGV when they try to map
> memory that can't be found.
>
>>> Or the OOMK will "off" a greedy process or two :-(
>>>
>> thats a serious error
>
>  That is the designed response to out of memory conditions on every
> flavour of unix I know, what else would you suggest ?
>
I wouldn't. I am not saying the behaviour is wrong or inappropriate,
just that it is in fact always pretty  *serious*.

It is te last ditch attempt to prevent a system crashing altogether: and
in most cases a hard reboot is a pragmatic option.


--
"Nature does not give up the winter because people dislike the cold."

― Confucius

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