FC3 and the oom-killer

[Andy Barclay]

Hi,

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Andy Barclay wrote:
> 
>> I am running 2.6.10-1.760_FC3 on my home machine.
>>
>> The machine has 2 GB of RAM and 4 GB of swap.
>>
>> I need to run windows XP in a vmware session (for accessing a 
>> customer's network with a windows-only vpn).
>>
>> I have allocated 1596 MB for my XP virtual machine. When I launch the 
>> guest OS,
>> after a short while, it gets killed.
>>
>> Looking in /var/log/messages, I find that this is because of the 
>> oom-killer. This just sucks. I don't ever want the kernel to randomly 
>> kill my processes. After researching this, I found that
>> if I echo "2" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory, it is supposed to 
>> disable the oom-killer.
>>
>> I've done this, and I *thought* this was working (I worked for a day 
>> without it kicking in), but now, I'm sure the value is "2", but 
>> oom-killer is still killing my vm. I've seen notes on the net that say 
>> the "2" is not supported yet.
>>
>> Does anyone know what I can do to stop this thing.....
> 
> 
> Reduce the VM memory foootprint?

I can't do that. I'm running a very memory intensive application which 
requires at least 1.6 GB of Virtual Mememory.


> 
> I have a 512M machine and vmware's recommendation for maximum memory 
> footprint is 276M.  (This is VMware-Workstation, not VMX, but I can't 
> imagine you need much more unless you are doing some heavy-duty serving 
> or computing.)

VMware's recomended maximum is 1700+ meg for my machine.

This is not a vmware problem. this is a problem with FC3. I still have 
3.8GB of swap free. I do NOT want the OS to ever randomly kill my 
applications. Unless it can read my mind, it cannot know what process to 
kill.

I just need to disable this oom-killer.

Andy.