Re: [fuse-devel] Question about error handling

[Gerard J. C. <gj...@ci...>]

Marc Andre Tanner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to know what is considered to be the right way to handle
> generic errors like malloc failures? As far as i understand the kernel
> is normally overcommitting memory, so malloc shouldn't fail and if it
> does then there is really no more memory available. Also since the file
> system is just a normal process it may be killed by the OOM Killer.
>
> With help of google i found a lwn.net article[1] from 2004 which mentions
> a patch which introduces a new ioctl to prevent processes from being
> killed. Do you know whether something like this hit mainline? Or is the
> setting in /proc/<pid>/oom_adj as mentioned in [2] the correct way to
> tweak the OOM Killer?
>
> Given these things, does it even make sense to test for malloc failures
> and if so what should be done when an error occurs? Simply aborting is
> probably not an option since there might be other file system operations
> active which could be completed without new memory.
>
> Is returning ENOMEM the prefered solution?
>
> Some comments/advices would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Marc
>
> [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/104179/
> [2] http://linux-mm.org/OOM_Killer
>
>   
I return ENOMEM