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Bug#636454: Out of memory: Kill process 3254 (Xorg) score 93 or sacrifice child



Subject: linux-source-3.0.0: Out of memory: Kill process 3254 (Xorg) score 93 or sacrifice child

Package: linux-source-3.0.0

Severity: important


I just got the following in dmesg:


[43627.304569] Out of memory: Kill process 3254 (Xorg) score 93 or sacrifice

child

[43627.304571] Killed process 3254 (Xorg) total-vm:595596kB, anon-rss:482176kB,

file-rss:368kB


Needless to say, not a nice interuption to my work :/


Looking through the dmesg log I notice it has killed firefox-bin and kdevelop a

few times before, which explains some "unexpected crashes" I thought had

occurred.


The only obvious solutions are to install more RAM (I currently have 4 GB) or

enable swap (not set up since I'm running off an SSD).


But failing this, I don't find the kernel's current behaviour very acceptable.

Killing processes without user permission isn't nice since it may lose work;

doing so and not telling the user why it suddenly died is worse. Even worse is

killing the xserver which is the parent of most other processes!


In the ideal world the kernel would stop things before RAM ran out completely

and nicely request processes to free memory or end or even ask the user what to

do, but that doesn't seem like it's likely to happen soon. Still, I find

killing the x-server unacceptable. Do you have any ideas what might be done?


Cheers,

Diggory



-- System Information:

Debian Release: wheezy/sid

APT prefers testing

APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')

Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)


Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)

Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash



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