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The functions, code excerpts and comments discussed below here are from mm/oom_kill.c unless otherwise noted. It is the job of the linux 'oom killer' to sacrifice one or more processes in order to free up memory for the system when all else fails. It will also kill any process sharing the same mm_struct as the selected process, for obvious reasons. Any particular process leader may be immunized against the oom killer if the value of its /proc//oomadj is set to the constant OOM_DISABLE (currently defined as -17). The function which does the actual scoring of a process in the effort to find the best candidate for elimination is called badness(), which results from the following call chain: _alloc_pages -> out_of_memory() -> select_bad_process() -> badness() The comments to badness() pretty well speak for themselves: