[PATCH] support for panic at OOM

This patch adds panic_on_oom sysctl under sys.vm.

When sysctl vm.panic_on_oom = 1, the kernel panics intead of killing rogue
processes.  And if vm.panic_on_oom is 0 the kernel will do oom_kill() in
the same way as it does today.  Of course, the default value is 0 and only
root can modifies it.

In general, oom_killer works well and kill rogue processes.  So the whole
system can survive.  But there are environments where panic is preferable
rather than kill some processes.

Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index a46c10fcddfc..2dc246af4885 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
 - drop-caches
 - zone_reclaim_mode
 - zone_reclaim_interval
+- panic_on_oom
 
 ==============================================================
 
@@ -178,3 +179,15 @@ Time is set in seconds and set by default to 30 seconds.
 Reduce the interval if undesired off node allocations occur. However, too
 frequent scans will have a negative impact onoff node allocation performance.
 
+=============================================================
+
+panic_on_oom
+
+This enables or disables panic on out-of-memory feature.  If this is set to 1,
+the kernel panics when out-of-memory happens.  If this is set to 0, the kernel
+will kill some rogue process, called oom_killer.  Usually, oom_killer can kill
+rogue processes and system will survive.  If you want to panic the system
+rather than killing rogue processes, set this to 1.
+
+The default value is 0.
+