4 ms·

Does doing this in user-space have any advantage beyond they could dev a PoC faster? It seems like building a better OOMK and having it live in user-space are o

• testvox 8y ago
  It's because this supports plugins which are intended to interact with other user-space programs in order to allow for cooperative resource management. These plugins would be much harder to write if they had to be implemented in kernal-space (you couldn't use standard user space libs for making RPC calls, would be easy to introduce kernal corruption if you don't know kernal programming). So yes it's for development reasons but not to allow for a faster POC. It's to allow non kernal devs to easily write plugins.
• josefbacik 8y ago
  It would be nice, but for complicated systems in the kernel you sometimes have to provide evidence that the old way sucks and the new way is better. With this work we can easily point at our production workloads and say the in kernel oom killer sucks and this new way is obviously better and hopefully work towards a better in kernel solution. That being said the user is always going to know what they care about more than the kernel, so being able to say “kill chef first, alway” can be a nice thing to have.