offline elfutils processing committed

[Stone, Joshua I]

On Monday, November 06, 2006 1:18 PM, Martin Hunt wrote:
> The point is damage control.  Systemtap allocates too much memory and
> oom killer gets active, the first thing it will kill is staprun and
> that should unload the module (but this seems broken at the moment). 
> So we haven't really hurt the system.

The goal is fine, but I don't think this accomplishes it.  My
understanding is that __alloc_pages will keep calling OOM until it is
able to satisfy the request -- thus the module is blocked waiting for
memory.  The process might end up something like:

stap module: allocate lots of memory
__alloc_pages: Not enough memory -> OOM kill something (staprun)
__alloc_pages: Still not enough memory -> OOM kill other stuff
__alloc_pages: Yay, now we have enough memory!
stap module: got some memory
stap module: Oops, staprun is gone, better exit...

Ouch...


Josh