I had a system running a 128MB live CD image with 2.8 gigs of available RAM and the OOM kernel killer went crazy when using dd for more than 8 minutes and kept killing everything. I've read that this is due to a low-memory issue and paging in the kernel and 32-bit systems with lots of RAM.
I even enabled swapspace on my LiveCD and the issue happened 25 minutes into dd rather than 8 minutes, so what gives?
Also no swap space was ever used!
cat /proc/s........