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........
Out of memory: kill process 7559 (rsync) score 635 or a child
Killed process 7559 (rsync)
I was surprised to see this in my dmesg whenmy rsync backup suddenly stalled/stopped.
This system has 3 gigs of RAM and lots of free memory so I don't understand what is happening.
rsync invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x200d2, order=0, oomkilladj=0
Pid: 7600, comm: rsync Not tainted 2.6.24.2 #83
[] oom_kill_pr........