Re: Setting oom_adj on linux?

On fre, 2010-01-08 at 11:37 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alex Hunsaker <badalex@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 07:27, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> >> Then, somebody who wants the feature would build with, say,
> >>        -DLINUX_OOM_ADJ=0
> >> or another value if they want that.
> 
> > Here is a stab at that.
> 
> Anybody have an objection to this basic approach?  I'm in a bit of a
> hurry to get something like this into the Fedora RPMs, so barring
> objections I'm going to review this, commit it into HEAD, and then
> make a back-ported patch I can use with 8.4 in Fedora.

I find this whole approach a bit evil.  If word of this gets out, every
server process on Linux will excuse itself from the OOM killer.  And
then the kernel guys will add another setting to override the process
preference.  It's an arms race, but maybe that's what's needed.