Re: Some interesting news about Linux 3.12 OOM

On 2013-09-19 11:49:05 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>> But, naturally, that will not be a problem
> >>> since all user-space code diligently checks the return status of every
> >>> system call and responds with well-tested error-handling code when
> >>> things go wrong.
> >
> > That just short circuited my sarcasm detector.
>
> I laughed, too, but the reality is that at least as far as PG is
> concerned it's probably a truthful statement, and if it isn't, nobody
> here is likely to complain about having to fix it. Yeah, there's a
> lot of other code out there not as well written or maintained as PG,
> but using SIGKILL as a substitute for ENOMEM because people might not
> be checking the return value for malloc() is extremely heavy-handed
> nannyism.

The "problem" is that it's not just about malloc() (aka brk() and
mmap()) and friends. It's about many of the other systemcalls. Like
e.g. send() to name one of the more likely ones.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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