Hi... I saw that others had replied your questions with good answers, so probably I just add something...
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Anand Raj Manickam <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a few doubts regarding Out of Memory . > > 1.Does memory leak in the kernel always lead to OOM ? sooner or later yes. And kernel won't get OOM-ed...it will simply continously leaking if the code is buggy until it stop by itself. Or the kernel no longer has free memory pages available from all zones. I think, in the worst case scenario, it will silently crash the kernel. > 2. I wrote a kernel test module testing the memory leak , which on > exit kmallocs > > exit_module () > { > while(1) > kmalloc((8*1024),GFP_KERNEL); > } > > so when i rmmod test , the kernel never panicked on OOM , but it > panicked on the page allocation stat (sorry for not attaching the > dump) sorry, what do you mean by "page allocation stat"? > Does the kernel differentiate between a Memory Leak and a Out of > memory situation ? IMHO it's not about whether we see it from kernel or user space perspective. It's about each of their meaning. Memory leak is a condition where allocation happens but reclaim doesn't happen at the same amount of allocation, thus there is an (growing) amount of stale memory. While OOM refers to a condition where allocator no longer able to find and assign free memory page for the requester, whether it comes from free directly memory pool or by previously flush page cache. -- regards, Mulyadi Santosa Freelance Linux trainer and consultant blog: the-hydra.blogspot.com training: mulyaditraining.blogspot.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to [email protected] Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
