In the badness() calculation, there's currently this piece of code:

        /*
         * Processes which fork a lot of child processes are likely
         * a good choice. We add the vmsize of the children if they
         * have an own mm. This prevents forking servers to flood the
         * machine with an endless amount of children
         */
        list_for_each(tsk, &p->children) {
                struct task_struct *chld;
                chld = list_entry(tsk, struct task_struct, sibling);
                if (chld->mm = p->mm && chld->mm)
                        points += chld->mm->total_vm;
        }

The intention is clear: If some server (apache) keeps spawning new children
and we run OOM, we want to kill the father rather than picking a child.

This -- to some degree -- also helps a bit with getting fork bombs under
control, though I'd consider this a desirable side-effect rather than a
feature.

There's one problem with this: No matter how many or few children there are,
if just one of them misbehaves, and all others (including the father) do
everything right, we still always kill the whole family.  This hits in real
life; whether it's javascript in konqueror resulting in kdeinit (and thus the
whole KDE session) being hit or just a classical server that spawns children.

Sidenote: The killer does kill all direct children as well, not only the
selected father, see oom_kill_process().

The idea in attached patch is that we do want to account the memory
consumption of the (direct) children to the father -- however not fully.
This maintains the property that fathers with too many children will still
very likely be picked, whereas a single misbehaving child has the chance to
be picked by the OOM killer.

In the patch I account only half (rounded up) of the children's vm_size to
the parent.  This means that if one child eats more mem than the rest of
the family, it will be picked, otherwise it's still the father and thus the
whole family that gets selected.

This is heuristics -- we could debate whether accounting for a fourth would
be better than for half of it.  Or -- if people would consider it worth the
trouble -- make it a sysctl.  For now I sticked to accounting for half,
which should IMHO be a significant improvement.

The patch does one more thing: As users tend to be irritated by the choice
of killed processes (mainly because the children are killed first, despite
some of them having a very low OOM score), I added some more output: The
selected (father) process will be reported first and it's oom_score printed
to syslog.

Description:

Only account for half of children's vm size in oom score calculation

This should still give the parent enough point in case of fork bombs.  If
any child however has more than 50% of the vm size of all children
together, it'll get a higher score and be elected.

This patch also makes the kernel display the oom_score.
Signed-off-by: Kurt Garloff <garloff@suse.de>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>