{"id":349151,"date":"2026-01-03T01:49:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T01:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/349151\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T01:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T01:49:11","slug":"linux-addressing-out-of-memory-killer-inaccuracy-on-large-core-count-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/349151\/","title":{"rendered":"Linux Addressing Out-Of-Memory Killer Inaccuracy On Large Core Count Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LINUX
\nA patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for the 6.20~7.0 kernel for addressing out-of-memory “OOM” killer inaccuracy behavior when dealing with large core count systems.<\/p>\n

A patch by Linux developer Mathieu Desnoyers made it into Andrew Morton’s “mm-everything” queue this week to fix out-of-memory killer inaccuracy on large many-core systems. <\/p>\n

\"High<\/p>\n

In early 2025 it was reported<\/a> that there were inaccuracies in the OOM killer when dealing with today’s high core count systems, at least in the 250+ core\/thread count range:
\n
“Recently, several internal services had an RSS usage regression as part of a kernel upgrade. Previously, they were on a pre-6.2 kernel and were able to read RSS statistics in a backup watchdog process to monitor and decide if they’d overrun their memory budget. Now, however, a representative service with five threads, expected to use about a hundred MB of memory, on a 250-cpu machine had memory usage tens of megabytes different from the expected amount — this constituted a significant percentage of inaccuracy, causing the watchdog to act.
…
This is a really tremendous inaccuracy for any few-threaded program on a large machine and impedes monitoring significantly. These stat counters are also used to make OOM killing decisions, so this additional inaccuracy could make a big difference in OOM situations — either resulting in the wrong process being killed, or in less memory being returned from an OOM-kill than expected. <\/p>\n

Finally, while the change to percpu_counter does significantly improve the accuracy over the previous per-thread error for many-threaded services, it does also have performance implications – up to 12% slower for short-lived processes and 9% increased system time in make test workloads.”<\/p>\n

This patch<\/a> working its way to the mainline kernel hopefully for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 cycle should address those inaccuracies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5870,59,5869,5867,5866,5873,5871,5868,5872,5865,5876,86,5874,5875,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-349151","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-desktop-linux","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-linux-benchmarking","11":"tag-linux-hardware-benchmarks","12":"tag-linux-hardware-reviews","13":"tag-linux-how-to","14":"tag-linux-performance","15":"tag-linux-server-benchmarks","16":"tag-open-source-graphics","17":"tag-phoronix","18":"tag-phoronix-test-suite","19":"tag-technology","20":"tag-ubuntu-benchmarks","21":"tag-ubuntu-hardware","22":"tag-uk","23":"tag-united-kingdom","24":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}