[maemo-developers] Out Of Memory handling in Maemo

[From: Mika Yrjölä]

On Feb 13, 2008 2:57 AM, Karthik Murugesan <karthik4tech at gmail.com> wrote:

>     [Karthik] But how the kernel decides which process is exempted
> from OOM-killing.  How can I change it.

AFAIK, this works in the same way as it does on Linux desktop; each
process has its own oom_adj pseudofile under the /proc filesystem. The
/proc documentation states:

2.12 /proc/<pid>/oom_adj - Adjust the oom-killer score
------------------------------------------------------

This file can be used to adjust the score used to select which processes
should be killed in an  out-of-memory  situation.  Giving it a high score will
increase the likelihood of this process being killed by the oom-killer.  Valid
values are in the range -16 to +15, plus the special value -17, which disables
oom-killing altogether for this process.